


1711 The Merchant Underground

by toushindai (WallofIllusion)



Category: Baccano!, Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-09 00:16:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4326492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WallofIllusion/pseuds/toushindai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Huey Laforet will do anything to bring Monica back. If that means joining forces with the House Dormentaire and selling Lotto Valentino to a monstrous creature that lurks beneath the surface of the earth--well, that's hardly a sacrifice at all, is it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

[front cover]


	2. [color insert #1]

 

> “I thought that was you. If you wanted a demonstration, there was no need to bring your own knife. Elmer has me wearing the hook again. He says your classmates will need help smiling soon. No, they don’t know yet, but rumors will get around.
> 
> “I know why you’ve come. You want to know if my immortality has anything to offer. But you don’t look very hopeful. I can see it in your eyes—you already know, don’t you? No alchemist in recorded history has achieved what you seek. My immortality is only for the living; even the Grand Panacea, the pinnacle of alchemical achievement, cannot bring back the dead.
> 
> “Now, now, wait a minute. Don’t be so quick to give up. I said that I know of no _alchemist_ who has achieved what you seek. But there are other forces in this world…”


	3. [color insert #2]

> “What do you know of the Mongols? Five hundred years ago, they ruled the steppes of the Orient until invasions and shifting political realities precipitated their decline. Their capital city, Karakorum, is said to have fallen to invaders in 1254—at least, in recorded history.
> 
> “There are rumors, though, that Karakorum was not defeated, but sold—and not to any powers that move the world now. They say that a cloaked merchant-ambassador offered safety to the city’s people in exchange for its allegiance; there are rumors, stranger still, that the city was swallowed up by a swarm of bats and dragged beneath the surface of the Earth. There are rumors, each more far-fetched than the last, as to what the terms of this ‘sale’ might have been, but they are consistent on one point: to guarantee the sale, the merchant-ambassador promised to save a doomed romance.
> 
> “Those same rumors have it that one such merchant-ambassador has been seen, lately, in Spain’s capital, seeking to bargain for a new city…”


	4. Epilogue A: Always Look to Love

Epilogue A: Always Look to Love

 

_February 1, 1861: Within the Bazaar_

The Queen Victoria was accustomed to tolerating social functions, even tiring ones; but this one seemed simply unnecessary. There was little uncertainty left in her heart. If it were up to her and her alone, she would sign over the capital of her empire in a heartbeat to have Albert at her side again.

The tall, cloaked beings who called themselves Masters of the Bazaar, however, insisted on a degree of propriety. They invited her down into their darkness, among the grasping spires of their grand Bazaar, for a soiree that honestly rivaled any that she’d ever been to. Out of respect for her loss, the mood was restrained rather than jovial, but the refreshments were extravagant and the company proper and very nearly enjoyable.

So she initially thought nothing of it when a man dressed in servants’ garb appeared at her elbow and asked her to follow him to a private meeting. With a glance to her guards, she confirmed that nothing was amiss, and she followed him up a stair to a small study. There, he announced her entry and bowed and took a seat in the armchair he indicated.

Seated already within the study were two figures: One, an elderly woman with pale skin, adorned with heavy gold jewelry. Her eyes were shrewd.

About the other figure, she could draw no conclusions. They wore a dark cloak with a hood and a white mask reminiscent of the Italian Carnivale. The mask was expressionless, almost eerie. The figure bowed their head when she entered; when they straightened, Victoria thought that perhaps their posture was that of a man, and when they spoke, the image was not contradicted.

“It is an honor to meet Your Majesty,” the cloaked figure said. His accent was somewhere between Spanish and Italian. “I’ve heard that you aim to make a deal with the Bazaar.”

Victoria’s attempt to straighten imperiously was ruined by a sudden, soft weight in her lap. She looked down in alarm to find a pure white cat making its way across her legs to perch on the armrest that should have been for her own left arm. It left a trail of white hairs across her mourning dress. A second cat found its way beneath her skirts to rub against her ankles. She looked up again, bewildered.

“Pay them no mind,” the elderly woman said, the suggestion of a smile tugging at her lips. “They only wish to welcome you.”

Another cat settled into the elderly woman’s lap, purring as she began to stroke it, and a fourth climbed across the back of the man’s chair. He, as the woman had requested, paid it no mind.

Victoria sat up in her chair and said, with frost in her voice, “We don’t believe we’ve heard who you are yet.”

“You may call me the Duchess,” the woman replied. “It has only been my title for some one hundred and fifty years, but I suppose I am accustomed to it now.”

Victoria narrowed her eyes, but no protest made its way to her lips. If she believed that the Masters could revive her husband, then she supposed she was required to allow for such longevity. Instead, she turned to the masked man. “And you?”

“I am called the Masked Regent,” he answered. There was a faint note of amusement to his voice. “After bargaining with the Masters one hundred and fifty years ago, it became my duty to manage the Fifth City. —The very city that you want to replace.”

Victoria looked between the two of them, beginning to suspect their motives. “You wish to convince us otherwise.”

Let them try: she knew all the arguments by now and could knock down every one. In the end, London was her own city to administer as she pleased, and it pleased her to ally with the ones who promised to bring her husband back.

But as she was preparing her arguments, the woman called the Duchess shook her head. “I would never,” she said. “But there are things you must understand, which the Masters may not be so quick to tell you.”

_Of course there are._

Victoria did not let her frown come to her face. She knew that the Masters’ offer was too good to be true. She had known that at once, long before her advisers dared to whisper it to her. The terms of the sale were too sweet, too impossible. She knew that they must have their own hidden agenda. But they had promised her her husband’s life, and her citizens’ safety. With those two things guaranteed, she was prepared to risk the rest.

“We are aware that our bargaining partners may not be altogether forthcoming,” she said. “Do you mean that we should expect betrayal?”

“Betrayal?” The Duchess’s lips twisted; it was difficult to tell whether she meant to form a smile or a grimace. “No, perhaps not. But their motives are far from altruistic.”

“We do not require them to be altruistic,” Victoria answered coolly.

Now the Duchess’s face softened. “I suppose not.”

“One never does,” the Masked Regent added, still speaking with secret amusement. Victoria turned to him, hoping to find his eyes behind the dark shadows of his mask and discern something from them. But the mask hid them well. A cat crept down the Regent’s front and nudged its head up under his hand, and he began to pet it idly as he continued. “I wanted to share with Your Majesty some of my own experience of dealing with the Bazaar, but I am not feeling like myself today—a periodic affliction which has struck at an inconvenient time. I wonder if you might permit the Duchess to tell it for me.”

“If you hope to change my mind—” Victoria began, impatient, but the Duchess held up a placating hand.

“As I say, we have no such intention. The Regent and I wish only that you may make a fully informed decision. You have seen some of the Fifth City; allow us to tell you what it was before it fell, and how it became what it is. Consider it a gift, from one bargainer to another. You may yet win better terms for yourself, if you arm yourself with information.”

At her side, a servant in dark livery bowed, poured her a cup of tea, and slipped back into the shadows. The Duchess and the Masked Regent watched her, and a cat (thankfully, a black one this time) settled into her lap. She had no reason to believe that these two were any more trustworthy than the Masters; but she believed in what the Masters might provide for her, and began to regard the two in front of her in the same way. With a nod, she instructed, “Speak, then.”

The Duchess answered the command with a half-bow, took a sip of her own tea, and began.

“There are two things which you must understand. First: that there is always, without fail, a cost which is known and a cost which is unknown. Be wary of what you promise and what is promised in return, for the Bazaar has its own needs, its own… appetites. And second: this bargain of yours is no mere anomaly. In the deepest matters of the Bazaar, look to love, always…”


	5. Chapter 1: Shadowy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An administrative note, first: the descriptions of Lotto Valentino and of Esperanza in this chapter lean heavily on the canon descriptions as translated from Japanese by me.
> 
> Also, please don’t run away from the first section, I promise that the vast majority of this fic is more of a Baccano! fic than than a Fallen London one, I promise.

_457th year of the Fourth City: A certain underground spire_

The Khan of Silk did not enjoy these meetings. One rather suspected that none of its colleagues did, but sometimes one bowed to propriety and necessity and all of their trappings. At least one did when contracted to the whims of a truant, lovesick Courier.

Today, at least, the topic for discussion was one of interest—even if some of the other Khans did insist upon blinding themselves to obvious realities.

“The Fourth City is well,” the Khan of Dreams insisted; it was not the sort to pound on tables, so instead it gestured elegantly with the talons of one wing. “It will live for a century more, at the least! Why hurry onward?”

“Why _hurry_?” the Khan of Spices hissed in return. “Are you blind to the infestation creeping across the City? Will you see it crumbled by the lords of Parabola before you will allow that it is in decline? It would be a mercy to end it now.”

Dreams shook its head. “You underestimate the City’s inhabitants, my dear Spices. They know well to ware serpents—”

“Do they!” Spices said, scornfully.

In the corner, the Khan of Swords did not speak, though it wrote constantly with both hands, its quill scratching angrily at the parchment. For some time, it had offered little input at these meetings, as though it considered them trivial. They _were_ trivial. But Silk despised it for its silence.

“My colleagues,” Silk broke in before Dreams and Spices could involve themselves too heavily in their own squabble, “what matters the city?”

Dreams and Spices turned towards it, suspicious. The Khan of Roots cocked its head.

“What do you mean, my dear?”

“What of the city’s standing? What does it matter whether it is not yet ruined or worthless to our employer? No one would claim that it is an empty husk just yet, but would our honored employer object to an infusion of new love stories? We may choose the Fifth City at our own discretion; that is, after all, an aspect of our contract. We need not waste our time waiting for the Fourth City to deplete itself.”

“And what is so wrong with waiting?” Dreams asked, amusement in its voice. Silk could have snarled its furor or reached out with its talons and slashed the life out of the hedonistic thing, but it remained motionless.

“There is nothing wrong with it, perhaps,” it answered, voice dripping with an exaggerated civility, “but one grows tired, so very tired, of it. I have had enough waiting to last the rest of our term, after the Second City.”

A muttering, a shuffling.

Only Dreams remained untroubled. “We haven’t been here nearly as long as all that. A little patience, my friend? All shall be well, after all—”

But it had lost the support of the rest; now they were either on Silk’s side or unwilling to argue too much with it. Silk prepared to take its leave. “I think, then,” it said, “that I will venture to the Surface and begin the search. That is, unless someone desires to stop me?”

Even Dreams, knowing it was beaten, sulked rather than raising an objection. Silk inclined its head in a parody of gracious greeting and swept out of the room. Once it was out of hearing range, it began clacking its talons together in the irritation it had so nearly failed to repress. It had had enough of their patience, their fiddling arguments and bargains and lies. They could put their faith in the empty promises of the Bazaar. Silk was tired of waiting.

⇔

_1711_

Lotto Valentino.

A small city of on the coast of Naples, it had a population of about fifty thousand and a climate tempered by its location on the Mediterranean Sea. Outside the city, a few orchards grew fruit; inside the city, imposing stone buildings lined the hilly streets and gazed out upon the sea. It was picturesque, but had little to recommend it in comparison to some of the bigger, more famous cities in the region. By and large, only merchants sailed into and out of its harbor.

At least, until two years ago.

But starting two years ago, a different variety of ship had begun to enter Lotto Valentino’s harbor: warships. Crowds of enormous warships that almost dwarfed the buildings lining the coast. And each of them bore the same crest: the golden hourglass of the House Dormentaire.

It wasn’t just the harbor that was stamped with this crest. Little by little, it began to appear on signs within the city itself. An inn here, a tavern there. Slowly, and then seemingly all at once, the House Dormentaire was taking over the city. A minor resistance had been launched a year ago, but it had been unsuccessful, and the soldiers of the Dormentaire combed the city for its members frequently. The resistance—the Mask Makers—were still at large for now, but as the Dormentaires continued their steady takeover, the Mask Makers’ capture seemed imminent.

And yet, some portions of the city remained unaffected. The Third Library was one such place. Lotto Valentino was, in fact, known for its high concentration of libraries, and a casual visitor to the city may have mistaken the Third Library for just one among them.

But in reality, it was not merely a library.

The Third Library housed private classes on a very particular subject: alchemy.

In some places, alchemy was looked down on as trickery, a charlatan’s art. The citizens of Lotto Valentino did not have the luxury of holding such a belief. Alchemy had manipulated their fates for years, from an enormous counterfeiting operation that nearly cost the aristocrats their supremacy to trade in a potent manmade narcotic. They were not well-loved, the alchemists who studied at the Third Library—and yet it remained unmolested. Small wonder, then, that people whispered that the city itself existed for the sake of the alchemists.

 

And yet, as the curtain opened on 1711, a force more dangerous than the Dormentaires or the alchemists roamed the streets of Lotto Valentino.

Those who’d seen it weren’t sure what they’d seen. Leathery wings, sharp claws—something like a bat, but far larger than a human. The sharp scent of lightning followed its presence, and the unmistakable sense that it was on the hunt. Had it killed anyone?—No, not yet. Not _yet_. But the rumors, even when they diverged, were all certain that it could only be a matter of time.

A fear crept over the city. Adults would not speak of this hunting presence, whatever it was, in a voice over a whisper. But the children of the city sang of it, adapting a nursery rhyme from six years ago:

_Here comes a monster, born between the stars_

_Here comes a monster, with sharp teeth and claws_

_Here comes a monster, all wrapped in cloth_

_Here comes a monster, to take away us all_

⇔

_Midnight_

The scent of lightning in the air.

A young man named Elmer C. Albatross had invited himself over to his friend’s manor for a few days, but despite the late hour, he was not asleep; instead, he stood on the balcony outside the guest room and watched the city.

At this time of night, there was very little to see; and yet, Elmer was certain that he had caught a glimpse of something—a roving shadow, a flash of leathery wing. A shape as black as the bottom of a well. He had heard the rumors in the city, and he wanted to know more.

“Elmer?”

He heard a female voice behind him and turned to find one of his friend’s servants looking at him in confusion.

“Is everything alright?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine!” he answered with an easy grin. “Just looking for that monster that everyone’s been talking about.”

“Oh dear!” The woman lifted a hand to her mouth. “I don’t even want to think about it. What if it sees you?”

“Then I’d ask it if it’s having fun flying around and hunting. If it is, it’ll probably be smiling, right?”

“I suppose…”

The smile fell momentarily from his face as the servant continued to fret. “Aw, now you’re worried. That’s no good! Here, I’ll get right into bed and go straight to sleep. Then you’ll smile, right? You have such a pretty smile.”

The compliment did its job—the woman’s concerned expression faded away. So Elmer hopped into his bed and pulled the covers up to his chin. “See? I’ll fall right asleep. Zzzz,” he added, sounding more like a bee than someone with a snoring problem.

She giggled. “Your eyes are still wide open,” she pointed out.

“Oh, fine.” He closed them. “You better keep smiling, though. Even if I can’t see it.”

“I will. Good night, Elmer.”

“G’night!”

And, soothed by the thought of her lovely smile, he was very soon asleep.

⇔

_Evening, in a church._

There was only one church in Lotto Valentino. And as a matter of fact, it was not within the city at all, but stood apologetically beyond the edge of town. Few of Lotto Valentino’s citizens were regular worshippers; it seemed almost that the gray stone building served as a place to inter the dead and nothing more.

Still, some came to mourn and pray for those they had lost. On this evening, one such mourner sat in the empty pews of the sanctuary. He seemed to be in his late twenties or early thirties, and his expensive clothing identified him as a member of the aristocracy. But other than that, he seemed entirely too bizarre to be a noble. Instead of the powdered wig and cloth beauty mark that were popular in aristocratic fashion, he wore a three-cornered hat and drew a star at the outer corner of each eye with makeup. The circles under his eyes seemed just dark enough to be deliberately drawn in with makeup, too. Despite his dark overcoat and dark expression, he looked more like a clown escaped from some traveling theater than a mourner.

But no one in the city would have dared to challenge him—for this was Esperanza Boronial, the count who governed Lotto Valentino. And though some derided him behind his back, calling him the Count Jester for his outlandish appearance, his power was undeniable. Even if it was slowly being sapped away by the Dormentaire occupation.

Esperanza had traveled to the church alone; even his carriage driver, left some distance away, had no idea why he had come. But as he sat in the candlelit silence, he heard the sound of someone else’s approach. Initially, he did not turn; only when the intruder came to sit in the same pew did he glance over. Recognizing the figure, his eyes widened.

“…Huey Laforet…”

The young man with dark hair and golden eyes inclined his head and spoke politely. “It’s been a year, hasn’t it?”

It had been: a year, to the day, since Esperanza’s younger sister, Maribel, had died.

The situation was not simple—officially, Maribel Boronial had died years ago, and the one who died last year had been a commoner, Monica Campanella, said to have killed Esperanza’s parents and the heir to the Dormentaire line. But “Monica Campanella” had only been a mask worn by Maribel, and the arrival of the Dormentaire ships in Lotto Valentino had shattered that mask. She was arrested; she died in captivity. If the Dormentaires’ insinuations were to be believed, she had been murdered by the Mask Makers in their assault.

But Esperanza did not believe their insinuations—because he knew that Monica herself had been the first Mask Maker.

And in time, she had come to share that role with a few others, including the young man who sat next to him now, his eyes unreadable. Esperanza had met him once before, only a few days after Monica’s death. Twisted by the heavy presence of grief, it had not been a friendly conversation.

“Do you intend to punch me again, for launching such a foolish assault and yet failing to save Monica?” Huey asked.

Esperanza gave a short sigh and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I was unwell, when we last met.”

“That is understandable.” Huey cast his gaze towards the stained glass at the front of the sanctuary. “You are better now, then?”

The count shrugged. He wasn’t sure whether Huey meant his question in a sympathetic manner, or an accusatory one. “Time does its cruel work. My rage at you, and at the Dormentaires, has worn away. My grief, and my disgust with myself for doing nothing, never seem to fade.”

To that, Huey did not immediately reply. His face, lit by the shivering light of the candles, was inscrutable; but Esperanza suspected that even in the light of day, he would not have been able to tell what Huey Laforet was thinking.

Finally, the younger man spoke in a quiet voice. “I wonder, then, if you have had time to think more on the questions I posed last year.” He turned slowly back toward Esperanza. “What would you give to bring Monica back? Would you sell Lotto Valentino?”

Esperanza’s eyes narrowed. Of course he remembered Huey’s questions; at times, he had hardly been able to shake them from his mind. He’d had something specific in mind—some kind of ritual or devil’s bargain. Something that sounded absurd, but there had been no indication in Huey’s face that he had been joking. Esperanza didn’t know what had frightened him more—the thought that Huey might be recklessly mad with grief, or the thought that, somehow, what he suggested might be true.

At Esperanza’s silence, Huey continued as if musing to himself. “Would it really be too great a price, in exchange for Monica’s life? Or might she be worth it? I’ve seen the last city they purchased. Its lot is not so terrible. It would mean transformation—it would mean giving up the sun—but the merchant promises safety to Lotto Valentino’s citizens. You may even be able to retain some of your power, if you will agree to the bargain.”

“If I agree to the bargain,” Esperanza repeated, his mouth dry. “And if I don’t?”

Huey inclined his head as if agreeing that it was a good question. But he didn’t answer it.

“Huey Laforet,” the count said slowly, “what are you planning?”

“What is Monica worth to you?” Huey asked, his tone even and determined.

Esperanza scowled, infuriated Huey’s questions and most of all by how unwaveringly serious he was. “Mar—my sister is _dead_ ,” he said, raising his voice. “This city is my responsibility, and I would never betray it for some mad delusion that she might be raised!”

Once more, Huey moved his head in a manner that was half-bow, half nod. Then he stood. “That is regrettable,” he said. “I had hoped you might understand, but I know that my goal is a selfish one. I will leave you to your privacy, then—”

“Wait!” Esperanza leapt to his feet and grasped for Huey’s arm. But time slipped forward strangely for a moment, and Huey’s arm wasn’t where it should have been; when Esperanza looked around desperately, the young man was nowhere to be found. Only a too-bright violet was left hovering in the back of his mind.

⇔

_One hour later_

When he returned his manor, Esperanza’s mind was still on his strange encounter with Huey Laforet. The young man was scheming something—he had made no secret of that. But it was the mention of “giving up the sun” that had stuck with Esperanza like the vestiges of a bad dream. At best, it was nonsense: Huey’s mind lost to grief. If it was not that, though… what was it?

The butler, one of his few male servants, introduced him to the new maid, recently hired from the Avaro family. Her name was Sylvie Lumiere, and it seemed that she had actually arrived much earlier in the day—only to be temporarily dragged off by Elmer. They had returned an hour earlier.

“Welcome, Sylvie,” he said, managing a smile. “I hope you will find your time here to your liking.”

“Y-yes, sir,” the young woman said, clutching at her braid of silver hair.

“Please forgive me for not being here to welcome you upon your arrival. I had business outside the city today.”

“Yes, sir,” again.

“There’s nothing I require of you today, so please, take as much time as you need to accustom yourself to your new home, Sylvie.”

Thus dismissed, the young woman curtseyed and let herself be waved back into the line of maids behind her. If his respectful way of speaking—unsuited to a master addressing his servants—struck her as strange, she did not comment on it, and Esperanza offered no explanation. His mind was elsewhere. With a signal to another maid, he indicated that he would take dinner, and he went alone to the dining room. His servants chattered amicably behind him, but he paid it little mind.

“Well, aren’t you a lovely one! Sylvie, was it?”

“From the Avaro household?”

“Y-yes…”

“What brings you here?”

“I…”

“No, no, there’s no need to push yourself, dear. And don’t worry, the Count will never push you, either.”

“Oh, he’d never!”

“But if you _wanted_ to talk about it, he’d listen so sweetly.”

“He’d serve you dinner!”

“And make sure you were comfortable before you started speaking.”

“And while you were speaking.”

“If there’s ever anything that displeases you, all you have to do is let him know.”

“U-um…”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“I thought he… he…”

“Oh, no!” “You poor thing!” “You’ve heard the rumors, haven’t you?”

“I’ve heard that he… has a taste for women…”

“Oh, poor dear. No wonder you’ve been shaking.”

“It’s all right!”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, we promise.”

“The Count loves women.”

“All women!” “Old and young!” “Fat and skinny!” “Pretty and ugly!” “Every skin color and hair color you can imagine!”

“He loves all of them, but he’d never lay a hand on a single one.”

“Not a one!”

“He only wants them to be happy.”

“…”

“So you see, dearie, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

“He treats us all very well.”

“He’ll treat you kindly, too.”

“I… see…”

“See, Sylvie, I told you there was nothing to worry about! I wouldn’t have brought you back here if it wouldn’t make you smile!”

“Hee hee. That’s Elmer for you. I bet that’s why you ran off with her earlier too, isn’t it?”

“Bingo! I couldn’t have Sylvie here looking all gloomy.”

“Elmer can’t stand for people to be gloomy.”

“It’s all about smiles when he’s around!”

“It’s too bad that he can’t make the Count smile on his own.”

“No, because the Count doesn’t care about men!”

“Not at all.”

“That’s why Elmer settles for making us smile instead!”

“Yes!” “He does!” “And _then_ the Count smiles!”

Elmer flashed Sylvie a reassuring smile as the maids dissolved into quiet giggles, and then took his leave of them. He plopped himself down in the chair to Esperanza’s left. When that failed to catch the count’s attention, he snagged the fork and knife that had been laid out for him and set their ends against the table. “What’s for supper?”

Esperanza continued to stare straight ahead, his brow furrowed. His expression was as far from a smile as it could have been.

Seeing it, Elmer frowned as well. “Aren’t you even going to complain about having to share your table with a man? You are _out_ of it, Speran—”

“I’m certainly not happy about it,” Esperanza replied curtly. But it seemed that he was too deep in thought to even bother to chase Elmer away.

So Elmer attempted a different tactic: “Hey, I saw Niki today—you remember Niki, right?”

Niki was a shared acquaintance of theirs. Elmer and Esperanza had met her on the same day six years ago, but shortly thereafter she had left the city. She’d only returned a year ago, and since then, Elmer occasionally let Esperanza know what she had been up to.

So at last, Esperanza turned to look at him, and there was even a faint smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “How was she?”

Elmer beamed. “She’s brightened up! She still doesn’t smile a whole lot, but she was joking with me. And guess what!” His smile took on a mischievous air then. “She’s in looove. She wouldn’t tell me with who, but I figured it out.”

Esperanza nodded and leaned his chin on his folded hands. “Good,” he said. “I’m happy for her.”

It was the truth, but even that news failed to lighten his heart. Soon he had sunk back into thought.

Elmer put the fork and knife down, worried for his friend. “Come on, Speran, what’s up? You hardly smile when I tell you about Niki, and you faked a smile for Sylvie, too.”

At that, Esperanza sighed, too. “I should have known it wouldn’t fool you.”

“Of course not,” Elmer answered, as confident as ever in his ability to distinguish between real smiles and fake ones. He waved his fork in Esperanza’s face. “That’s why I’m so worried. Who’s ever heard of Esperanza Boronial failing to smile when he sees a woman?”

“It is unlike me, I’ll admit.”

“What’s bothering you?” Elmer asked.

Esperanza leaned back in his chair with a creak. “I went out to the church today.”

“Ah, for Monica?”

 _So he_ does _realize what day it is._

Esperanza had suspected as much, ever since Elmer had appeared at his front door the prior evening. And though he would have expected anyone else to mourn over a lost friend, he found he wasn’t surprised by Elmer’s flippancy. Even if it felt like a sign that Elmer hadn’t cared for Monica, he had to believe it wasn’t.

At least Elmer had the sense to put on a more somber face now. “Well, in that case, I won’t force you to smile. I still think you should, though—”

“It isn’t her that’s on my mind.” Even in his grief, he should have been able to pull himself to greet a new (female) servant.

Elmer tilted his head, confused.

“Huey Laforet is a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

Elmer’s eyes lit up there. “Huey? Of course! Why do you ask?”

“I met him at the church.”

“Ahh. You know, that makes sense. I haven’t seen him in a year—how was he?”

“Well, he certainly wasn’t smiling,” Esperanza said, answering the question Elmer wanted to ask most.

Elmer gave a grudging nod, crossing his arms in thought. “Yeah, I guess not. Monica’s death really hit him hard.” He peered at Esperanza’s face. “Did he do something to bother you?”

Esperanza remembered the unflinching determination in Huey’s eyes. “He’s scheming something. Something big. Something…” He made a vague gesture, unable to formulate words for the deep sense of unease that Huey had left him with. “It galls me to have to rely on a man, but can I make a request of you?”

“Oh, come on. You know I’ll do anything to help someone smile!” Elmer reassured him with a flash of a grin. It wasn’t actually reassuring. It made Esperanza’s stomach twist, made him wonder if he was taking unfair advantage of his friend.

But he had to know what Huey had in store for Lotto Valentino—not as an individual, but as the man responsible for this city. The count shoved aside his uncertainty and asked, “Can you approach him, Elmer? Find out what he’s scheming?”

Elmer, too, seemed abruptly serious, as if he understood Esperanza’s ambivalence or had reservations of his own. “It won’t be easy. He’s tricky,” he warned. But then a grin spread across his face once more. “It’ll be nice to talk to him, though! And I _am_ wondering if he’s found anything to make him smile in the past year. I’ll see what I can do.”

⇔

_Lotto Valentino harbor_

It was night by the time Huey returned to the city. After his escape from Esperanza, he had taken cover some distance off the path and waited for the count to pass by in his carriage. Then he had followed on foot.

Truth be told, he would have preferred not to have to “escape” Esperanza at all. He had hoped for the count’s support. Monica had never spoken much of her brother, or at all of her past, but from her attitude and from the occasional tidbits that Elmer dropped, Huey had suspected an uncomplicated love undergirding a complicated situation. Their brief meeting last year had only reinforced this impression. He hadn’t really minded when Esperanza hit him; in a way, being struck by Monica’s older brother had been almost therapeutic. Huey understood well the way that self-disgust hounded powerlessness.

But without the hope that Huey had found, it seemed that Esperanza was still trapped in his grief. Too trapped, even, to reach out for the possibility that Huey offered him.

In the deepening darkness of the night, Huey made his way to the harbor, winding between the sailors and merchants who remained without paying them much mind. But before he could board the ship he was aiming for, someone grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Huey Laforet.”

He turned to see a woman dressed in red and gold soldier’s garb. The light of nearby lamps revealed that her eyes were narrowed in her dark-skinned face.

“Ah, Carla. Good evening,” he said politely. “Do I still require an escort?”

“Yes,” she answered gruffly. Since his arrival in the city, it had been clear that Carla didn’t trust Huey. Understandable, perhaps, considering that the assault on the Dormentaires’ ships last year had happened on her watch. “Are you carrying any weapons?”

“Just these,” he said, slipping a velvet bag out of his pocket. Two spherical shapes could be vaguely seen within it.

Carla took the bag from him. “And those are?”

“Explosives. But I wouldn’t look at them for too long; they emit irrigo rather than heat and energy.”

“Irrigo?”

“You could call it the color of forgetfulness. It turns out they work very well for making an escape from unfortunate situations. I had my first successful test earlier today.”

Carla was not much reassured by this pronouncement. She looked Huey over with a critical eye before turning and leading him up the ramp, across the deck, and towards the dining cabin. There, she knocked on the door.

“Presenting Huey Laforet.”

“Ooh, wonderful,” came a voice from inside the cabin. “Show him in.”

Carla opened the door and bowed shallowly to Huey as he entered. Huey, in turn, bowed to the two people already seated in the cabin: a man, about his age, with light brown hair that covered his eyes, and a woman whose age was unclear but whose beauty was undeniable. It was she who spoke first.

“How did it go?”

Huey gave a wry smile. “Regrettably, Lady Lucrezia, the count remains uninterested in my proposal.”

The woman—Lucrezia de Dormentaire—lifted the corner of her napkin to her mouth daintily, making no effort to hide the avaricious glint in her eyes.

“Well, then,” she said, lowering the napkin again to reveal a smile. “I suppose Lotto Valentino is as good as mine, isn’t it?”


	6. Chapter 2: Persuasive

The Echo Bazaar.

It sounded like the paranoid imaginings of a drunkard: a sentient market crouching beneath the skin of the Earth like a great tapeworm, appropriating human cities one by one in order to serve as its host. If Huey had first heard of it from, say, Elmer, he probably would have dismissed the tale out of hand as a bizarre attempt at a joke.

Coming from his alchemy teacher, Dalton, the story had a little more weight to it. Even so, Huey remained skeptical at first; but careful perusal of Silk Road writings (especially the journals of a missionary to Karakorum) revealed a pattern too coherent to be false. Karakorum had been taken by the Bazaar in 1254. It had been purchased from its ruler, for the price of the city’s protection and a love story.

⇔

Huey’s primary impediment was that he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the ruler of Lotto Valentino. This was particularly galling because he very nearly had been, once, after buying out most of the city’s nobles with money he’d counterfeited. But that had been spoiled by the rise of the drug trade, and he doubted it would work again. At the very least, Esperanza, the _de jure_ governor of the city, would never fall for it. On top of that, Esperanza had no interest in selling the city to the ones called the “Masters” of the Bazaar. Huey had approached him as soon as the plan began to take shape in his mind, hoping at least to arouse the count’s interest; but Esperanza must have thought him mad and refused to even entertain the notion.

So Huey withdrew, and a few days later, he set off for Spain. According to merchants’ reports, one of the Bazaar’s cloaked agents, calling itself the Khan of Silk, had been in Madrid for some time. Most likely, it was trying to take advantage of the chaos of the War of Spanish Succession; but so far, it had had no luck. Hoping to change that, Huey arranged an audience with it and made his offer.

“It’s very small,” the Khan of Silk remarked, leaning over the map that Huey had laid out on the table. The Khan was tall, taller than a human, and wrapped in robes of expensive-looking cloth. Its face was hidden deep within the shadow of his hood, even in the lamplight of its study. Huey, who was wearing the white mask and black cloak of the Mask Makers, seemed like an ironic (albeit much smaller) echo of him.

“It isn’t as large as some of the other cities in the area, true,” he agreed. “But it lies on several crucial trade routes, and it remains strangely untouched by the current war. We take the most pride in our libraries—despite our small size, the number of libraries rivals that of cities such as Barcelona and Madrid, and I can personally vouch for their quality.”

“Libraries.” The Khan made a dismissive gesture with its cloak-sleeve. “I have a colleague who might be interested in that, but it does not tempt me.”

“There is one particular library that may yet ensnare your interest.” Huey tapped the location of the Third Library on the map. “Does the Bazaar have any use for alchemy?”

“Alchemy?”

“I will confess that Lotto Valentino seems like a trivial city, to an outsider. But it is unique in one regard: the Third Library, here, houses a clutch of apprentice alchemists. I have here a brief summary of some of their recent accomplishments, though I ask you to hold it in confidence, due to the controversial nature of some of the research featured there.”

Huey handed over the documents he’d brought, and the Khan flipped through them idly. “Am I correct to suppose that you are one of these alchemists?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Hm.” The Khan bent over the map once more, peering closely at the Third Library’s location as if the very secrets of alchemy might be hidden in the ink lines. In a moment, it straightened. “And why do you, who take such pride in the city as it currently is, wish to sell it?”

Behind the safety of his mask, Huey swallowed and arranged his words carefully before speaking. “I have heard that to anchor the loyalty of each city it purchases, the Bazaar offers its aid to a love story—no matter how doomed that love may be. I will be frank and admit that that is where my true interest lies. My—the woman I love died, just over a month ago. It would take some time to explain the details, but I assure you that I am not being trite when I say that I would do anything to have her back.”

The Khan nodded slowly in acknowledgement. “It is convenient,” it said, “to have a love story ready at hand. But if that is your sole interest, I must wonder, do you have the right to sell the city at all? Do you have anything to offer besides a broken heart?”

Huey inclined his head and spoke his prepared answer. “The count who governs Lotto Valentino, Esperanza Boronial, is her older br—”

“And?” the Khan of Silk cut him off.

Surprised at the abrupt interruption, Huey could only say, “Pardon?”

“And do you expect me to believe that you come with his blessing when you come without his seal, without a letter of introduction, without the retinue of servants anyone sensible would provide someone traveling on official business? Are you anything more to that city than an inhabitant?”

Huey remained silent. If he were dealing with a human, and if the hope of bringing Monica back were not riding on this, he might have lied. He couldn’t bring himself to risk it now.

Reading the answer in his silence, the Khan spoke with scorn. “You are nothing,” it said, “and I am so very tired of all of you who think you’re so clever, coming to me to sell what doesn’t belong to you. I will not be taken in by petty duplicity.” It raised one arm and pointed a bony finger towards the door. “Remove yourself from my presence, or I will have you removed.”

Huey bowed and then reached out to collect his maps. But the Khan of Silk slammed its hand down onto the table, and the maps ripped as though it had claws rather than fingers beneath its gloves.

“Leave them,” it said, its tone a shade less civil than it had been. “Get out. Now.”

Another bow, and Huey made his retreat.

⇔

But he was not without recourse.

If Esperanza would not help him, he would go to the other force vying for control of Lotto Valentino: the House Dormentaire.

Frankly, he did not relish the thought. A family of powerful Spanish nobles, their arrival in Lotto Valentino two years ago had caused Monica significant distress. Huey hadn’t asked why, initially. Only after Monica disappeared did he learn how closely her past intertwined with the Dormentaires’.

He learned the truth through a play. A strange source of truth, perhaps, but an earlier play by the playwright—one Jean-Pierre Accardo—had laid bare secrets of Huey’s past that few could have known. And so when Monica disappeared, a horrible intuition brought Huey to the theater once more. He’d hoped he was wrong.

Instead, he found that he was sickeningly right.

In the play, a young noblewoman killed the heir to another noble family when he assaulted her. Rather than risk revelation of the assault, they arranged a new identity for her—that of a commoner—and sent her to a faraway city. There, she lived a peaceful life as an apprentice alchemist, until the younger sister of the man she had killed came to her new home, seeking revenge.

The young woman was Monica.

The noble family, the House Dormentaire.

The past that Monica hadn’t been able to tell him about had been portrayed before his eyes.

From there, it was painfully easy to figure out what had happened: after watching the play on her own, Monica had turned herself in. She’d hoped to forestall the ending of the play, in which a character from Accardo’s earlier work—the character who represented Huey—wielded the fires of hell itself to drive the nobles away for her.

She must have thought, _If the Dormentaires are after me, they may go after Huey, too._

She must have thought, _I can’t let them hurt Huey for the sins of my past._

She must have thought, _If I sacrifice myself, I can keep him from becoming involved._

And thinking all these things, she left Huey behind without a single word of goodbye.

She was wrong, in the end, because Huey had refused to sacrifice her. He would rather have evoked the Dormentaires’ rage, would rather have seen Lotto Valentino wiped off the map, than lose Monica. And so he had gathered what firepower and human resources he could, donned the garb of the Mask Maker, and launched an attack on the Dormentaire ships.

To an ignorant eye, it would have looked like an attempt to drive their invading presence away, but his only goal was to free Monica. It was the only thing he’d thought of for months.

But someone had stabbed her before he could reach her; from a distance that made him helpless, he watched her say _let’s meet again_ , give one last shining smile, and sink beneath the waves.

 

Even so, his initial reluctance to turn to the Dormentaires to sell Lotto Valentino was not out of resentment. Just as he was willing to sacrifice Lotto Valentino to their wrath for Monica’s sake, he was willing to join forces with whomever was necessary to bring her back.

The source of his reluctance was Lucrezia de Dormentaire.

Currently the heir of the family, she was the one directing the invasion of Lotto Valentino. And she was the sister from Accardo’s play, the one who had sought to take revenge on Monica for murdering her brother.

It seemed unlikely that such a woman would willingly see Monica brought back to life.

But he would have Monica back, whatever lies and manipulations it took. If he had to deceive her and earn the wrath of the House Dormentaire once more, that was no reason for him to stop.

And so, he gathered what information he could.

He learned that she was shrewd, and greedy: learned that Lotto Valentino was far from the first city she had launched a slow, encroaching invasion of.

He learned that she employed a number of alchemists of her own.

And he learned that it was, unusually, a simple matter to approach her. She took a seemingly endless stream of lovers, both nobles and commoners alike. Huey was not particularly interested in that approach, but it was something he could use. He leveraged coin and lies carefully: to those who resented her infinite dalliances, he pretended to be a spurned lover, and to those who supported them, a hopeful potential lover. To those who fell in neither camp, as much counterfeit money as it took to get them to look the other way.

This was how he reached the bedroom of one of the most powerful women in Spain just before midnight. Clad again in full Mask Maker garb, he reached out to where her bare arm rested above her covers and shook her awake. When she opened her eyes to look at him, he held a finger to the lips of his mask, gesturing for her silence. She only tilted her head.

“I have business with you,” he said in a low voice.

“Is it private?” she whispered in return.

Taken aback by her easy response, it took Huey a moment to nod. When he did, though, she said, “Give me a minute. Take a few steps back, you’re standing right in a moonbeam.”

Well, yes, he was—that had been deliberate—but in a moment he realized her intention as she sat up (the slipping covers revealing that she was entirely naked) and shook the shoulder of her bed-companion. Only a muffled grumble answered, so she gave a pretty little sigh and reached beneath the covers. In a moment, her companion yelped as if pinched.

Now that he—it was a male voice—was awake, Lucrezia stroked his hair. “I need you to go, darling,” she said in English.

“F’ckhn time is it?” he asked indistinctly.

“Just about midnight.”

“Something wrong?”

“Not at all. There’s just someone I need to speak to.”

“You’d better not be kicking me out of bed in the middle of the damn night for someone else…”

Rather than answer immediately, Lucrezia turned to Huey with a raised eyebrow. Huey shook his head sharply, and she turned back to her companion. “Nothing like that, just a little business. Out you go.”

The man grumbled a little more as he gathered his clothing and got dressed, lacing his words with casual profanity all the while, but when Lucrezia reached out for one last kiss, he was happy to grant it. He smiled at her before he left. “I love you.”

“I love you too, darling. See you again soon?”

“Anytime.”

He walked straight past Huey without noticing him, to Lucrezia’s obvious but silent amusement. When the door finally swung shut, Huey finally stepped out of the shadows. Lucrezia draped her arms over her knees and regarded him. She had not, at any point, bothered to put on clothes.

“Sorry about that. He doesn’t see well in the dark,” she said in Italian, almost as if apologizing that her companion had failed to notice Huey.

Nevertheless, Huey bowed his head to accept the strange apology, and when he looked back up, Lucrezia’s eyes were glittering in the moonlight.

“Now, what do you want, Mask Maker of Lotto Valentino?”

Huey settled himself into a nearby armchair. “You have taken interest in my hometown.”

“Mmhmmm,” Lucrezia answered, almost a purr. “Not the city itself, you know. I’m mostly intrigued by the alchemists that inhabit it. I’m sure you’re aware of their achievements—their counterfeit money, a certain narcotic… there are rumors that one of their number has even achieved immortality!”

_Three of their number_ , Huey corrected mentally, but he saw no reason to reveal his teachers’ secrets just yet. Instead he nodded vaguely to encourage Lucrezia to continue. She needed little encouragement, leaning forward eagerly.

“You know, I hear rumors of a strong connection between the alchemists and you Mask Makers. Is it true?”

Huey didn’t answer directly. “If it were, what would you do to gain the secrets of the alchemists?”

“What would I do? Mmm, quite a lot, probably. Did you have something in mind?”

“Would you sell Lotto Valentino itself?”

“Sell it? To whom?”

“Do you know of the Echo Bazaar, milady?”

Lucrezia tilted her head. “You ask a lot of questions, Mask Maker.”

“I could say the same of you.”

Lucrezia chuckled and averted her gaze for a moment. When she looked back, there was mischief in her eyes. “I think you’re flirting with me. Are you _quite_ sure you wouldn’t like to join me in bed?”

Beneath his mask, Huey pursed his lips. “I apologize if I give that impression, milady. I assure you my intentions are purely strategic.”

“If you say so. Tell me, then, about this ‘Echo Bazaar.’ Is that where I’d be selling Lotto Valentino?”

“Not quite. You would, in fact, be selling the city _to_ the Bazaar.”

She raised her eyebrows, inviting him to continue. He spoke of what he’d learned from the traders’ and missionaries’ journals: an enormous cavern beneath the surface of the earth, a living bazaar where secrets were reliable currency and human souls could be traded for brass and jewels. He spoke especially of the wide underground sea just past the edge of the Bazaar’s influence, and of a land, on the sea’s southern edge, from where death had fled, leaving its inhabitants with immortal life.

As he’d suspected, this caught her interest, but she was not so easily ensnared. “Now why would I sell Lotto Valentino, after all the hard work it’s taking us to get our hands on it, rather than securing our hold on your dear hometown and then going after the Neath separately?”

He bowed his head in acknowledgement of her question. “As a practical consideration, if you were to explore the Under-Sea, you would want a secure foothold from which to administer your business. Under-Sea travel is said to be treacherous, and the tales of, for instance, a floating black mountain with a particular appetite for ships cannot be entirely discounted.”

“Oh my,” Lucrezia remarked.

“Beyond that…” Huey continued, “I would say that the primary reason to sell Lotto Valentino is that I am asking you to.”

“Oh!”

The slight sarcastic edge to her voice mocked the idea that this should be sufficient reason, but Huey was undeterred. He took a coin out of his pocket and flipped it towards her; she caught it with ease.

“I am the counterfeiter,” he told her.

With real intrigue shining in her eyes now, Lucrezia lit a lamp on her bedside table to examine the coin. By sight alone, of course, she would not discover its falsity. She weighed it carefully in her palm instead, and Huey continued.

“In addition, I have discovered an—affinity, of sorts, for working with fire and explosives in recent years. I would be happy to work in your service, should you require something along those lines.”

“Oh, I’m sure we could think of something,” Lucrezia said with a smile. Having examined the counterfeited coin to her satisfaction, she flipped it back and forth over the tops of her fingers idly. “You’re almost there, Mask Maker. Tell me one more thing.”

“You mean immortality, don’t you?”

“I have an alchemist of my own who thinks it’s utter nonsense.”

“It isn’t.” Huey had pierced Professor Dalton’s throat with a knife and watched his body renew itself. “I know who, among the alchemists of the Third Library, has achieved what you seek.”

Lucrezia stopped toying with the coin for a moment. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me?” she asked, her voice the sweetest it had been yet.

“Unfortunately, Lady Lucrezia, I will not sell another’s secrets so cheaply. I would need a show of good faith from you before I would even consider it.”

“So, if I sell the city for you?” she said.

A deep nod.

Lucrezia considered him for a moment, and then the coin began dancing across her fingers again. “Just one more question, Mask Maker,” she said, her voice soft. “You have laid out some very attractive terms for me, but you haven’t told me yet what you would get out of all of this. Why should you want to see your home fallen to me, only to be sold to some monstrous, inhuman entity and dragged beneath the ground?”

Behind his mask, Huey gave a grim smile and offered an explanation that was more misdirection than an outright lie. “My home though it may be, I have little affection for Lotto Valentino. I tried to bring it to ruin once before, with my counterfeiting; does it surprise you that I would make another attempt?”

“Mm,” Lucrezia mused, “I suppose I might believe that.”

But the coin stilled in her hands again, and something about the glint in her eye gave Huey pause. She set the coin on her bedside table. Then she smiled, beautifully, and slid out of bed with all the grace of a snake.

“Still, are you sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the Bazaar’s promise to preserve a doomed love story?”

She approached Huey, who felt suddenly frozen in place.

“Or perhaps with Monica Campanella, the very murderer I sent my men to Lotto Valentino to catch?”

With a gentle hand, Lucrezia de Dormentaire pushed back the hood of Huey’s cloak.

“Who turned herself in because a silly little play too accurately depicted her crimes, all the while insisting—insisting _quite_ forcefully, my dear Carla tells me—that her lover was innocent?”

She untied the ribbon that held Huey’s mask in place.

“A lover who, in the play, had the same penchant for fireworks that you’ve just confessed to me?”

She pulled the mask away from his face and set it in his lap. With its filter gone, Huey was hit by a wave of peach-scented air, laced with hints of sweat and sex. Lucrezia cupped a hand against his cheek.

“Are you going to tell me that your interest in the Bazaar has nothing to do with any of that… Fire Witch?”

Huey had been still until that moment; then, all of a sudden, he had a stiletto in hand, its tip grazing the skin of Lucrezia’s wrist.

“Since it seems you already know, I will speak bluntly: only Monica may lay a hand on me in that manner.”

“My, my,” said Lucrezia, whose smile had grown icier and icier. Her gaze did not drop to the knife for even a fraction of a second. “It’s bold enough to fall for a girl who murdered a handful of Spanish nobles at the tender age of ten, but to speak her name to the little sister of one of the men she killed? That verges on cruelty.”

She did not lower her hand. He did not lower his knife. A long moment passed—and then the ice vanished from Lucrezia’s eyes and she flounced backwards to take a seat on her bed once more.

“Not that I care,” she said, and laughed.

Huey gaped at her.

“Oh, come now,” she said, crossing her legs and leaning back on her hands. “We _just_ went over this. I want the alchemists, _maybe_ the city. I _never_ wanted your girlfriend.”

“But the play…” Huey protested.

“It lied about your involvement, right? Well, it lied about mine, too,” Lucrezia pointed out. Then she waved her hand dismissively. “If we ever find that playwright, I’m sure we’ll come up with some very creative ways to convince him to explain himself. More importantly, I’m insulted that you thought I wouldn’t have heard of the Bazaar. Poor Silk has been skulking around Madrid for _months_ , looking for someone with a city to sell. To be frank, Lotto Valentino never even occurred to me as a candidate. It’s so tiny.”

Huey realized that he was still holding the knife aloft and lowered it to his lap, then took a deep breath to collect himself. “The Khan of Silk expressed the same concern to me,” he admitted cautiously, “but mentioning the alchemists seemed to catch its attention.”

“As did, I’m sure, your pretty little love story.”

Huey’s stomach clenched. “I would prefer that you did not mock it.”

“ _I_ would prefer that you didn’t propose an equal partnership while lying to me all the while. Shall we call things even and move forward in a more amicable manner?”

Huey narrowed his eyes and stared at her. She seemed sincere; but she had seemed sincere a few minutes ago, too, and he was beginning to suspect that her sincerity might be a capricious, unpredictable thing.

“My terms are agreeable to you, then?” he asked slowly.

“You mean, ‘will I help you exchange Lotto Valentino for your girlfriend’s life’?” Lucrezia prompted with another one of her beautiful smiles.

Huey’s mouth felt dry. _If she’s toying with me…_ He couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought, or even to speak in response to her question. He could only nod.

But Lucrezia clasped her hands together then, delighted. “They are agreeable,” she said, “provided you keep your promise about the immortal alchemist. If not… well. Soon there will be nowhere on Earth or under it safe from the reach of the House Dormentaire. I think reneging on your promise would be very foolish.”

Huey’s heart was pounding as he nodded once more. But not because of her threat—not really.

“I will not betray you, Lady Lucrezia,” he promised.

And thus, a partnership between Huey Laforet and Lucrezia de Dormentaire was born.

⇔

A bored-looking secretary informed the Khan of Silk that it had two visitors. Yes, they were looking to sell a city, he assured it. No, they didn’t say which. Yes, they declined to identify themselves. Silk sent the secretary a shrewd glare, but the bored look on the secretary’s face did not waver. “Will you see them?”

“Oh, all right,” it replied, and he showed them in.

Silk immediately regretted its flippancy, for the two figures were both familiar to him. One was a woman, the daughter of the House Dormentaire, who had approached him any number of times in the past half-year with unsatisfactory offers. The other was the masked figure of a few days earlier, a desperate, heartsick commoner. He followed behind Lucrezia de Dormentaire deferentially, and bowed in Silk’s direction as he entered. Lucrezia, who seemed to show off considerably more of her skin than many of the other females in this region, did not bow.

“Hello again,” she said with a bright smile.

Silk wasted no time on niceties. “If I have no interest in dealing with either of you individually, do you really believe that you have something to offer me together?”

“Might we at least make the offer first?” came Lucrezia’s answer.

Silk waved one gloved hand sharply. “Can I expect it to be different from any of your other offers? Barcelona? Paris? The last time you came before me, Lady Dormentaire, you asked me if I would buy Seville from you and would not leave my office until I suggested that the governor of Seville himself was on his way to meet with me at that very moment.”

The masked figure turned his face towards Lucrezia with a posture that suggested surprise, but Lucrezia’s gaze did not waver. “I may have overestimated the current reach of my family’s power before,” she demurred, “though I can assure you that all those cities and more will be ours in the end. However, you ought to be able to guess what I hope to sell you this time, considering that I’ve brought Huey along.”

Silk dug through its memory for the name of the city. “Lotto Valentino,” it said eventually.

“It’s a quaint place, from what I hear—”

“What you hear!” Silk broke in, almost a snarl. “If this is your same scheming, Lady Dormentaire—”

“It isn’t,” Lucrezia answered calmly, and turned towards the masked man she had called Huey.

Huey nodded deeply. “Though Lady Lucrezia has not yet visited my city personally, I can assure you that the soldiers she has been sending for the past year and a half have done their work well. Lotto Valentino lies well within Dormentaire grasp.”

Silk narrowed its eyes and looked between the two of them. They stared back, neither wavering. Lucrezia’s smile did not diminish. Silk focused its gaze on the masked man. “If I recall,” it said evenly, “you spoke of the city being in the control of a man—your lover’s older brother, was it not? While I will not pretend to fully understand the intricacies of your species’ physical distinctions, Lady Dormentaire does not look at all like a man to me.”

Lucrezia sent Huey a swift glance before turning back to Silk. “Forgive my subordinate’s impertinence,” she said. “He lied to you earlier, hoping to expedite the sale. I assure you, I control Lotto Valentino.”

Huey bent in what might have been an apologetic bow and then straightened; the mask kept his attitude unreadable. Silk did not trust him, and it certainly did not trust Lucrezia. “I wonder if I have not yet sufficiently communicated what might await one who makes a false bargain with me,” it said lowly. “We of the Bazaar have been deceived once before, and I did not relish the experience. It is most important to me to avoid something similar happening again, and I will not deal leniently with anyone who attempts it. For instance, I do think I would be well within my rights to rescind any terms offered under false pretenses. Any and all terms,” it emphasized, its gaze focused squarely on the masked figure.

Lucrezia gave a little laugh and fluttered a hand in an attempt to draw its attention. “ _Really_ , Silk, do you think—”

“Wait,” Huey interrupted. Lucrezia sent him a sidelong glance again, but she shut her mouth and waited.

“Yes?” Silk said with exaggerated patience.

“I swear to you that Lady Lucrezia will control the city within a year.”

“A year!” Silk exclaimed, looking between the two of them incredulously. “Why would I wait a year to bargain with liars like the two of you for a city that is not a tenth the size of this one? You mock me, and waste my time. I do not have the patience for it. Get out, and do not return.”

Apprehension was clear in the masked figure’s pose, but the woman stood her ground. She waited until Silk was about to speak again to open her mouth.

“It is a matter of patience, isn’t it?” she asked sweetly, her eyes fixed on Silk. “Of waiting for success to come your way. You’ve been all over Europe with no success yet, but maybe luck will finally be on your side now. It certainly isn’t _impossible,_ right, Huey?”

She turned towards her companion, but he seemed as baffled as Silk was as to what she was going on about.

“If you truly want to wait longer, then wait: for someone who has their own schemes for the Bazaar, or for someone who brings you greed rather than a love story. We know, after all, that the Bazaar can survive such things, don’t we? As long as you’re _patient_.”

Something in her posture or the glint of her eyes recalled sand and heat and stagnation. Trapped layers of robes and corsetry, Silk’s wings twitched and strained as if they itched. “What do you think you’re talking about, woman?”

She shrugged gracefully. “ _Am_ I talking about something in particular?”

“If you mean to threaten me…”

“I, threaten you? That’s _backwards_ , Silk, dear.” She pressed a finger to her smiling lips. “My goals, and Huey’s, are almost _painfully_ transparent, and they align well enough with yours. You want a city, quickly and regardless of quality; we want to sell you this city in exchange for his dead girlfriend. As Huey promises, Lotto Valentino will be mine within the year. It’s others, who won’t lay their intentions quite so bare, that you need to be wary of. That, and the possibility that you won’t find any others at all.”

Silk narrowed its eyes at her. “And your solution is for me to sit around and twiddle my fingers for a year while you scrabble to consolidate your power over a port town?”

Lucrezia shrugged. “You needn’t simply sit and wait,” she said. “But how does this sound? Make a _provisional_ bargain with us right here, and right now: if you haven’t found anything else by the time Lotto Valentino is mine, the sale is ours. Unless you have another objection?”

“What if my objection is to bargaining with a liar like you?”

“If you’re so worried about liars, I’m not sure ‘merchant’ is the right profession for you,” Lucrezia said with a delicate roll of her eyes. “But I think you’ve frightened poor Huey enough that he’ll keep me honest, hmm?”

“It would be my pleasure,” Huey added gravely.

“You see, he’s _absolutely_ crazy about his darling Monica. He’ll do just about anything to have her back, and I simply can’t imagine he’d risk losing her a second time, so he won’t tease you like I might. You can believe in that even if you don’t trust me, can’t you? O collector of love stories.”

Hidden in the shadow of its hood, Silk’s face soured. It believed that, yes, but only because it had spent excruciatingly long centuries learning just what ridiculous lengths humans would go to for love. To say nothing of the Bazaar’s caprice. Love was all-consuming, and a triviality. A tiresome contradiction.

And yet it was precisely the business of such nonsense that it was contracted to, and if it wanted to be free of its contract as quickly as possible, it needed to play along.

“Be aware,” it said, “that I will consider _any_ reasonable offer more trustworthy than yours, Lady Dormentaire. And be aware, further, that if you have not fulfilled your end of the bargain within a year, I will not entertain any more proposals from you. Either of you.”

The gravity of the warnings seemed to be lost on the woman. “Then we have a deal?” she asked.

“A provisional arrangement,” Silk corrected her.

“Of course. A provisional arrangement.” A dazzling smile. “Wonderful. I do look forward to a more cordial relationship in the near future, my dear Silk.”

“And I, the successful fall of a Fifth City,” Silk replied.

_Whatever that city may be, let’s just get this over with._

 

_Directly thereafter_

“That could have gone somewhat better.”

“Oh, nonsense. Silk is stubborn, but _so_ impatient. He just needed to be nudged towards the latter trait.”

“You seemed very knowledgeable about the Khan of Silk and its desires.”

“All the better to bargain with, hmm? And we have, as you may have discerned, met a few times before.”

“I did notice that.”

“When you visited him before, you were masked then, too?”

“Of course.”

“Have you considered not wearing a mask? It’s a tiny bit silly.”

“I am accustomed to bargaining from behind a mask, but if it displeases you …”

“No, I wouldn’t say it _displeases_ me. It’s just strange, that’s all.”

“We are about to sell a city of alchemists to a monster who lives beneath the surface of the earth. I think my mask may not be the strangest element of this story.”

A laugh of genuine delight. “No, I don’t think we’ll know what the strangest part of this story is for a long time yet.”

⇔

And so, time flowed onward.

The House Dormentaire sent ship after ship to Lotto Valentino, slowly securing their hold on the city through cash and subtle threats. Boronial control over Lotto Valentino grew weaker and weaker, but letters from Carla Alvarez Santonia, who had been dispatched to lead the Dormentaire presence there, reported that Esperanza himself would not bend.

In the meantime, Lucrezia accompanied the Khan of Silk to the Neath on several journeys that she called “exploratory diplomacy.” Huey accompanied her the first time, spending a week there to see just what he was getting his hometown into, but the Khan advised that those who wished to return to the surface should not stay long below ground. Lucrezia remained charmingly undissuaded, and with each journey she brought back more riches and wilder stories: temples that worshiped dream-serpents; an island where even inanimate objects spoke with their own voices; a continent on the south shores of the great Under-Sea whose citizens never died. Her eyes shone most brightly when she spoke of the latter, which she called the “Elder Continent.”

“But don’t worry,” she reassured Huey when he narrowed his eyes at her tales. “Even if I can figure out the secrets of _their_ immortality, it won’t mean that I’m not interested in the alchemists’ version of it. I want them both.”

He understood that she was telling the truth. The House Dormentaire was widely known for their greed, and Lucrezia lived into that greed with a bright enthusiasm that unsettled. She wanted lovers and money and power, yes, but her vision was not limited to such trivialities. She wanted Lotto Valentino, and she wanted the Neath; she wanted Spain, Europe, the world. And, with sanguine confidence, she reached out to claim them as if it were only a matter of time before everything fell into her hands.

⇔

The designated year neared its end, and Esperanza was no closer to budging, though his city was nearly overrun. A week before the anniversary of Monica’s death, Huey offered to make one last try to convince him.

“Did he care for his little sister that much?” Lucrezia asked with a delicately arched eyebrow.

“I know that he deeply grieved her passing,” Huey answered. “He may yet be convinced of the value of selling Lotto Valentino.”

Lucrezia did not look convinced. But it was nearly time to make the sale, no matter what form it took. So they set sail for Lotto Valentino: not in one of the gaudier ships that might have advertised Lucrezia’s presence, but in one of the warships that the city had long since grown used to. They drew no attention as they entered the harbor on the anniversary of Monica’s death.

And, as Lucrezia had guessed, Esperanza still considered Huey’s talk of selling Lotto Valentino to the Bazaar to be complete nonsense.

“I did tell you so,” Lucrezia observed, still smiling.

Huey nodded to her point. “I apologize, Lady Lucrezia, for the time I’ve wasted.”

She waved away his apology, eternally amused, and the man seated next to her cocked his head with a smile. “Of course, if a woman such as yourself were to ask him, Lady Lucrezia, he might yet listen.”

“Oh, I know,” Lucrezia said. “But I don’t _want_ to share the city with him. Huey just looked so pitiful when he asked that I couldn’t bring myself to dash his hopes myself.”

Huey was, by now, rather used to bearing the brunt of Lucrezia’s aimless mockery, so he only inclined his head. “I wouldn’t say they were high enough to be ‘dashed’ in the first place, but they have been laid to rest now. Shall we proceed with your original plan?”

“Fermet and I were just talking about that, actually. Sit down, sit down.” Lucrezia gestured towards a third chair, and Huey took a seat. “Do you know Fermet?”

The man with heavy bangs was the one to answer. “We’ve met, actually, long ago.”

Huey peered at him, digging through his memory. He did look familiar, but not enough to place. “I’m afraid I don’t recall…”

“Oh, it was just in passing, some years ago. I was bringing some friends to visit Professor Dalton one night, just as you and your friends were leaving the Library.”

As he spoke, Huey was finally able to bring the memory to mind.

_That’s right, I was with Elmer and Monica at the time… But didn’t he seem surprised when he saw me, for some reason? I never figured out why._

Keeping his suspicions to himself, Huey held out his hand. “Of course. Forgive me for not remembering sooner. I’m Huey Laforet.”

“Lebreau Fermet Viralesque. You may call me whatever you like.” Fermet shook his outstretched hand, still smiling. “As students of the same teacher, I hope we’ll get along well.”

“Of course,” Huey answered politely, and withdrew his hand. At some point during the introductions, one of the servants aboard the ship had brought him a plate, and he began to eat as Lucrezia spoke again.

“Fermet was just bringing me some bad news, dear. He says that some of your Third Library friends are about to flee the city.”

Huey narrowed his eyes. “Flee?”

“Mmhmm.” Lucrezia leaned back and crossed her arms in a pout. “Despite all of our orders to leave the Third Library alone until the city falls, it seems like something’s spooked them.”

“Forgive me, Lady Lucrezia,” Fermet broke in with a regretful smile. “I should have been more diligent in reporting the atmosphere of the city. The truth is, as Dormentaire control over the city has grown, rumors have spread that you are after the alchemists. I tried to sow suggestions to the contrary, but the rumors are as stubborn as weeds. Their alleged connection to the Mask Makers has not helped.”

“Nor has the fact that it’s true, I’m sure,” Huey muttered.

“Indeed. It seems that a number of vigilante groups think that they can expel the Dormentaire presence from the city by offering them what they want, and they are planning a considerable assault of some kind. I am given to understand that something similar happened once before…” He turned his face towards Huey; though his eyes were still hidden by his bangs, the tilt of his head made his question clear. Huey nodded once.

“In 1705,” he explained, “there was… something like a mob, frankly. The entire city turned its rage on the alchemists in the space of a single night. I believe it was that night that the drug trade began to falter.” He gave a wry smile. “The Third Library emerged unscathed, but even so, I would have hoped to avoid encountering such an atmosphere again.”

“Once in a lifetime seems like it would be enough,” Fermet remarked with a sympathetic smile.

“More than enough,” Huey agreed politely, his expression not wavering. As it happened, that night in 1705 had not been his only experience of such a frenzy. Five years earlier than that, the small village where he had lived peacefully with his mother had been visited by a band of people calling themselves witch-hunters. By the time they’d departed, there had been no village left to speak of.

Fermet, who could not have known this, continued his analysis of the city’s current state.

“For all that Lotto Valentino may be a city built for alchemists, to its citizens who are otherwise inclined, alchemy can only serve as a scapegoat for the level-headed and a genuine source of fear for the more superstitious. Such fears have always led to lynchings and witch hunts. Unless the city suddenly becomes a bastion of lasting peace, free of disruptions, suspicion will fall upon the alchemists again. It’s only natural that those of the Third Library would want to escape. Still…” Here, he hesitated before continuing. “…Escape may not be their only purpose.”

“Meaning?” Lucrezia prompted.

“If I understand the information I am receiving correctly, they aim to board a ship called the Advenna Avis and set sail for the New World. And while they are in transit, it seems that they aim to conduct some kind of ritual. Again, if my information is correct, it seems that they intend to summon a devil in order to learn the secrets of immortality.”

“A devil?”

“That is what I’ve heard, Lady Lucrezia.”

Lucrezia tilted her head and spoke as if to herself. “That’s strange, I didn’t know they were involved in such things…” She put a hand to her mouth, a faint smile on her face, clearly enraptured with thoughts that she chose not to share. Huey spoke again to Fermet.

“When are they planning to leave? Can we bring the city down before they do?”

Fermet inclined his head in a nod. “That’s what we were discussing before you came in. The ship is scheduled to arrive tomorrow or the day after, so it would be difficult to finalize Lotto Valentino’s sale before then, but not impossible. Alternatively, there is also the option of preventing the Advenna Avis’s arrival, or its departure once it arrived—certainly, the House Dormentaire has the firepower in the city to do so at this point.”

Lucrezia spoke again. “I wonder…”

“Do you have something else in mind?” Fermet asked.

“I do.” She tapped her finger against her lower lip in thought. “Szilard and Victor are in town, aren’t they?”

“I believe so. They arrived about a week ago.”

“Can you get them onto the ship?”

Fermet tilted his head in question. “Onto the ship, milady? You mean the Advenna Avis?”

“Of course! They are alchemists, after all,” Lucrezia explained. “It’s right up their alley, don’t you think? I know Szilard isn’t at all convinced about this idea of immortality, but I’m sure he’d perk up if he saw it carried out in front of him. He’s never met a piece of information he doesn’t like, after all. And Victor is such a sweetheart; he’ll do just about anything I ask. Just think!” Her eyes sparkled. “We could have a foothold among the first alchemists of the New World, all without leaving Europe. Well, the Neath may not be Europe, properly speaking. But that’s beside my point.”

Fermet smiled. “I see. So we allow the alchemists of the Third Library to flee and plant a spy or two among their midst? That is truly a plan befitting the House Dormentaire.”

“Isn’t it?” Lucrezia answered with a dazzling smile of her own. “We can’t let them think they can escape our grasp by running away on a silly little boat, after all.”

“No, indeed.” Fermet stood. “I do not believe Professor Dalton would mind such a minor change to the passenger list. I should be able to make that happen.”

“Could you take care of it then, dear? Oh, and if you see Silk, let it know that the city must not fall until the Advenna Avis departs.”

“Understood.” Fermet bowed to Lucrezia and Huey. “It was a pleasure to see you again, Huey. I look forward to working with you more closely.”

“Likewise,” Huey answered, echoing the bow with a nod of his head. Fermet smiled and departed, shutting the door behind him.

Huey set about finishing his supper in silence, pondering what he had learned.

“You look troubled, Fire Witch,” Lucrezia said in a moment, looking completely untroubled herself.

She did still insist on using that nickname occasionally. Huey hid a wince and pulled a meaningless smile back onto his face. “Forgive me, Lady Lucrezia. This is a lot to take in, having just returned.”

“Mm, but Lotto Valentino has always been a rather eventful place, hasn’t it? With the drug trade, and the counterfeiting…”

She launched into a lilting monologue about the alchemists’ legacy in the city then, and Huey paid it very little attention except to make a polite noise of assent whenever she referred to any chaos he had caused personally. She did so without malice, and he accepted it without care. His thoughts weren’t really on the city. He was trying to consider the alchemists’ planned escape and what it might mean for Lotto Valentino’s sale, but frankly his unease came from the man who had just left. The longer he had spoken, the stronger Huey’s sense of déjà vu had grown.

_Is it just from that night outside the Third Library…? But we hardly interacted at all then. And I still don’t know why he was so surprised…_

_Lucrezia seems to trust him, which probably means that he isn’t an open threat._

_…Though it’s hard to tell, with her._

_I need to focus on the sale for now. But once the city falls, I should do what I can to find out more about him._

He resolved not to trust Fermet.

But this was not unusual: Huey Laforet trusted very few people indeed, and despite his déjà vu, he saw little reason to pay him particular mind when he had the city’s sale to finalize. There would, he decided, be time to investigate Fermet once the city had fallen. For now, he turned his mind to other things.

⇔

The man named Lebreau Fermet Viralesque continued to smile as he left the dining cabin and passed by Carla, standing guard at its entrance. He continued to smile as he made his way to the deck and into the clear night air; he continued to smile as he disembarked the ship and walked through the city. In all likelihood, he would be smiling for the rest of the night.

_So Huey Laforet seeks to use the power of the Echo Bazaar…_

It was all he could do to keep from bursting into laughter. At times, chuckle or two nearly slipped out of him and he had to touch a hand to his mouth to stifle it as he walked.

_This is incredible—better than anything I could have dreamed. To have a chance to play with him again, so soon after I killed his dear Monica…_

His hand curled as if once more gripping a dagger, and he remembered the feeling of stabbing it into her heart. The joy, the exquisite high of that memory was beginning to fade with time, but meeting Huey today had reminded him. Technically, Huey was hiding his pain well, perhaps even from himself. But no man alive clung so fiercely to determination and hope if there was not pain behind it.

_Dear, dear Huey… you found something to care about again, didn’t you?_

_You almost learned your lesson after the first time, but you opened your heart up to Monica. And now, hope has you in its talons._

_Such gentle talons. One might forget that they have sharp edges at all._

_But_ you _should know better. You should have bottled your heart back up when she died, just like you did when we were children._

_But you haven’t done that._

_Instead, you’re allowing yourself to hope. And believe me: there is nothing more beautiful than the moment a person’s face turns from hope to despair. I watched Monica’s face change. I wanted to make sure I saw that much, before she died._

_How poetic, how_ theatrical _, it will be when that same despair comes for you._

“Heh… aha ha ha!”

Finally the task of holding in his laughter became too much for Lebreau’s self-control. He pressed a hand to his mouth to quiet it, but it slipped out between his fingers: laughter that glittered like the stars above with joy and childlike delight.

_Let’s have some fun together, Huey._

⇔

The ground again. Silk folded its wings into itself, wrapped itself into the fine cloaks that demanded and created a human-like shape. A hood pulled low across its face had no great effect on what it saw and did not; even in this form, it benefited more from sound than sight. The sound of its cloaks sliding against the stone-paved street, its feet hobbling along. All the sounds of this restricted existence. Three more cities, and then freedom, it reminded itself.

Soon it would be only two; the sale of Lotto Valentino was all but guaranteed. As the Dormentaire woman had predicted, no other serious offers had appeared before Silk: only the occasional scheming worm who sought to sell a rival’s city. Humans so often thought they were cleverer than they were. Weeks ago, it had given it up entirely and come here to see what it was being sold.

Its impression was mixed. Lotto Valentino was small, but that it had known from the start. The libraries promised by Huey, the masked bargainer, were indeed plentiful, and without a doubt Scrolls would be delighted to steal their contents for itself. But what Silk hadn’t predicted, what it couldn’t have predicted, was the sense of busyness that had struck him after only a day or two of observing the city. The harbor, the markets, the streets: they all swelled with life and activity, even untouched as the city was by the war. But there was a tension in the hustle and bustle. The people of the city were afraid of something. Was it because of the encroachment of the Dormentaires? Perhaps; certainly that had its effects on their activities. But while the Dormentaire presence still felt like an invading tumor, the sense of unease felt more natural, almost intrinsic to the people themselves.

In various ways, the city was less than ideal. But Silk was not searching for ideal, any more than it was searching for a city healthier than the Fourth City’s decaying shell. If Lotto Valentino was in some way insufficient, that only meant that the Fifth City would be short-lived and the fall of the Sixth City swift. To that, Silk had no objections.

“Hey there.”

Finding itself addressed, Silk turned towards the sudden voice and found that there was a figure standing a few feet away. In the dark, it was hard to distinguish any great number of details, but he was certainly beaming quite broadly. In Silk’s experience, the only humans who smiled like that were the truly insane—mostly, those who thought they were hunting the Vake for the thrill of it.

“Pardon?” it asked in a polite voice, untouched by fire.

“Are you new to Lotto Valentino?” the man asked. “I’m Elmer, by the way, Elmer C. Albatross.”

Silk was temporarily flummoxed, taken aback by the man’s chatty friendliness. But here, on the ground, it would be inconvenient to cause an outcry; better to answer this man’s cheer with its own imitation of the same. It tried to hold itself like the irritatingly jovial Khan of Dreams and formulated a name that better suited the human tongues of the West: “You may call me Mr. Veils. I am a traveler to your city—a merchant, out late on business.”

“Hmmm, I see.” The man called Elmer put a chin to his hand as if in thought, peering at Silk. “You’re not human, though, right? Since you were flying around the city just now.”

Silk froze. The man was still smiling as if he’d said nothing unusual, but no ordinary human should have been able to perceive the Vake’s flight. “What do you mean?” it asked slowly, peering closely at Elmer.

“That black thing that’s been flying around at night for… a few weeks now, I guess?” Elmer responded, clarifying the wrong point. “It landed around here and I thought I’d come take a look. Some people have been uneasy, so I thought if I could figure out what’s going on, I could put their worries to rest. Am I wrong? Is it not you? Sorry for calling you inhuman, if that’s the case.”

For a moment, Silk didn’t answer. Was _he_ human? He lacked the peculiar resonance that those from the Elder Continent usually had, and few of the Neath’s other human-shaped denizens would have survived long on the surface. Perhaps he was just peculiar. If that was the case, then the solution was easy enough. Silk—or rather, the Vake—knew all about how to deal with the foolhardy. It gestured widely such that its cloak-sleeves billowed and revealed its sharp talons.

“If I were inhuman…” it said in an eerie whisper, “if I were a monster stalking the skies of your city, would you think it safe to confront me in the dead of night like this?”

The strange human named Elmer remained unintimidated, only nodding as if Silk had made a good point in a debate.

“Yeah, like I said, that’s part of what I’m trying to figure out—if everyone should be worried or not. But that doesn’t really matter right now.” His smile, somehow, grew even brighter, and he waved away the answer to the question he had just claimed to be pursuing. “What I want to know is, do you have fun flying around like that?”

Silk stared, uncomprehending. Elmer prattled on.

“Or to put it another way, were you smiling while you were flying around? I mean, this is just a guess ‘cause your hood hides your face pretty well, but I get the feeling you aren’t really smiling now. I was wondering if you were enjoying yourself more before.”

“And what if I was?” Silk demanded.

“Then like I said, were you smiling?”

What an absurd question. Silk slid its hands into the openings of the opposite sleeves and tried to discern the man’s purpose for asking. “What should it matter to you if I smile?”

“I like it when people smile,” the man answered easily. “And I’m curious, too. I’ve never had the chance to find out what makes a monster smile before. Is it okay if I call you a monster? If there’s another word for it, I can use that instead.”

This man focused on the strangest things. Frankly, Silk had just called itself a monster, so that was the _least_ irritating aspect of this entire baffling conversation. It was tired, so _very_ tired, of dealing with humans. “What would make me smile,” Silk said, an edge to its voice, “is to finish with my business and return home.”

It meant, of course, not to the Dormentaire ship that had carried it here but to the black space between the stars where it was could rend air and flesh with its talons in equal measure. But Elmer could not know this and, apparently, did not care to.

“Huh, I see! Is there anything I can do to help you finish your business faster?” he asked.

“No,” Silk answered, its voice still even, its patience barely maintained, and it prepared to rebuff the man further; but before it could speak, he raised his hand in farewell.

“I guess I’ll just wish you good luck and stop holding you up, then!” he said. “If you’ve got the time when you’re done, though, I’d really love to see that smile. Do you know where the Third Library is?”

Beneath its hood, Silk’s eyes narrowed. The Third Library—the alchemists’ stronghold?

Without waiting for confirmation, Elmer said, “I’ve been hanging around there a lot lately, and if I’m not there, someone’ll be able to point you in my direction. So come find me when you’re ready to smile, got it?”

Silk was, again, flummoxed. Did this Elmer figure think they had made some kind of deal just now? Had it at any point agreed to whatever Elmer was proposing? It was an impossibility, anyway; even at ridiculously optimistic estimates, there was no way that the remaining three cities would fall within a single human’s lifespan.

But it had no desire to prolong the conversation by sharing any of this information, and no qualms about making promises without the intention to keep them. Silk gave something that might generously be called a nod. “I will consider it.”

“Great! You know where to find me, then.” Elmer gave a cheeky wave, turned, and strolled away, as casually as if their conversation had in any way resembled a normal one. With narrowed eyes, Silk watched him go.

_The Third Library… Is he an alchemist?_

Huey had mentioned, once, that some of his colleagues at the Third Library were unusual. Frankly, Silk had paid little attention to the warning at the time; while it would engage the alchemists’ services for the sake of the Bazaar once the city was below ground, it couldn’t imagine that much of their work would fall under its own domain.

Now, though, it found itself hoping that it would not cross paths with Elmer C. Albatross too often. He was an irritating man, and Silk had better things to do.

It resumed its stately progress towards the harbor. The city would fall soon, and then life would resume the familiar rhythm of the Neath. If it was not fulfilling, at least it would be familiar. And there would be Vake-Hunters to terrorize.

It indulged in thoughts along those lines for a few minutes, and very nearly didn’t notice when another figure stepped out of the shadows towards it. This time, though, it was someone familiar: moonlight glinted off the white mask that Huey Laforet wore.

“…What is it?” Silk asked.

“Pardon my interruption, Khan,” he answered with a shallow bow. In contrast to the man’s usual sedate tones, Silk thought it could hear a hint of amusement in his voice. “I have a message for you that Lady Lucrezia asked me to pass on right away…”

⇔

_The next morning: Boronial manor_

“Th… thank you.”

Sylvie regarded the plate before her, heaped with a delicious-smelling breakfast, and thanked Count Esperanza Boronial in a shaking voice. It was not the first time she had seen such an elaborate meal, of course; but it was it _was_ the first time such a meal had been placed in front of her not merely for her to serve it to someone else, but to eat.

And on top of it, the one encouraging her to eat was a noble himself.

“You’re very welcome,” the count, her new master, said in a gentle voice. The smile on his face looked honestly kind. “Please, eat as much as you like without hesitation.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sylvie steeled herself and reached out for one of the pastries on the plate before her. She still couldn’t believe it. Though the other maids of the house had reassured her that Esperanza meant nothing but the best for his servants, it had alarmed her to be brought before him this morning, and her hands had shaken as she stood before him with her eyes cast down. But to her surprise, he led her into the dining room and entreated her to take breakfast with him. He said that he had not been himself the day before and regretted giving her an improper welcome.

But this had to be even more improper—for him to offer breakfast to a servant-girl and speak so politely, to smile so kindly. Most of the nobles Sylvie had encountered were nothing like this. The only other noble who had ever smiled in her direction, Gretto—

—and then she made herself take a bite of the pastry, to distract herself from that train of thought. _I have to forget him,_ she told herself, and it was as useless and painful as it had been yesterday and all through the night.

“How is it?” Esperanza asked. “If it doesn’t suit your tastes, please don’t force yourself to finish it. There are a variety of different flavors here.”

Sylvie shook her head. “N-no, it’s delicious. Thank you very much.”

“Ah, wonderful! I’m so glad you like it.”

The pastry was rich and flaky, with a jam filling; having barely eaten yesterday, Sylvie was starving and finished it in no time. When she looked up, the count gestured to the plate once more, inviting her to take a second, and she bobbed her head in gratitude before helping herself. Only then did Esperanza take a pastry for himself.

“Your name is Sylvie, isn’t it, miss?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s a beautiful name. It suits you.” Another maid stepped forward to serve the two of them coffee, and Esperanza smiled at her in the same warm way before turning his gaze back to Sylvie. “Miss Sylvie, I hope you won’t think me too forward, but I heard from my friend that you were feeling unwell yesterday. I will not pry into your affairs, but I sincerely hope that whatever was troubling you has been resolved.”

“Oh…” Sylvie dared to sneak a sidelong glance at Esperanza’s face and found only concern there. Her heart felt like a stone, and she lowered her eyes once more. “…It’s fine now,” she whispered.

_That’s a lie._

Sylvie bit into the second pastry to keep her thoughts of bitter self-recrimination from showing on her face. It _should_ have been fine. The rumors she had been so afraid of—that the count was a deviant monster who preyed on women—were nonsense, a misunderstanding. She should have been relieved to find herself here, with a kinder master than she’d had previously.

But she couldn’t forget why she had been sent here in the first place.

Gretto Avaro.

He was the second son of the House Avaro, whose power in Lotto Valentino was second only to the Boronials’. Gretto was kind and open and foolish enough to fall in love with a servant in his own household and Sylvie had been foolish enough to love him back. And she was _still_ foolish enough to love him back. Even though his father had found out and sold her to Esperanza in a rage. Even though he had threatened to punish Gretto for her folly, should she ever dare to try to see him again. Even though she had spent a long, sleepless night trying to convince herself that their love had been doomed from the start, that it never could have worked, that it was better for her to simply forget the happiness they’d shared. To forget about him altogether.

But every time she tried to forget, the thoughts only came back stronger and tightened their grip around her heart.

Esperanza was watching her, so she nibbled at the pastry, though its sweetness suddenly seemed to stick in her throat.

“If there’s ever anything I can do,” he said, “please do not hesitate to ask me. I want you to be comfortable and happy here, Miss Sylvie.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sylvie said again. “Really, everything’s fine. I feel better after talking to Elmer.”

She stole another glance at the count’s face, worried that she was being too impertinent. But he only gave a wan smile back.

“Good,” he said softly.

The worry in his eyes remained, and Sylvie had the sense that he didn’t believe her. But what else could she say? She could hardly protest to him that no matter how comfortable his manor might be, she wouldn’t be happy here, separated from Gretto. He would almost certainly take it as an insult. Even if he didn’t—if his absurd favor extended so far that he would sympathize and try to reunite the two of them as Elmer had yesterday—for Sylvie to see Gretto again would only put him in danger.

_I have to forget him. There’s no other way. There never was._

_I was stupid to think there was, and I knew it was stupid._

_This is a fortunate way for it to end. There was never any hope of something better happening._

The thoughts clattered around in Sylvie’s head, but they were no longer an attempt to convince herself. Now they were only cacophonous self-abuse. She tried to cut them short, to turn her mind to other subjects so that her pain wouldn’t come to her face, but before she was sure that she’d succeeded, there was some kind of indistinct commotion from the entryway.

“What on earth…?” Esperanza’s face took on a puzzled look, and he pushed his chair back as if to stand. “Miss Sylvie, I am loath to cut our breakfast short—”

But he had no need to leave; the sounds of commotion were coming closer. Sylvie began to make out the sound of heavy footsteps, and the distressed voice of the count’s butler:

“Madam, if you would wait, _please_ , my lord the Count would be more than happy to receive you—”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible,” a sharp female voice answered, and it was then that the commotion reached the dining room. A woman with short hair and dressed in a soldier’s uniform appeared, flanked by a number of men in identical garb. Sylvie narrowed her eyes in confusion. The uniform was that of the Dormentaires.

Looking harried, the butler slipped through their ranks to perform his duty. “My lord, I present Carla Alverez Santonia and… company.”

“Of course. Carla.” The count wore his gracious smile again, and he stood to acknowledge her entrance as if she had been shown in properly. “It is good to see you again. To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

At a nod from the woman—Carla—the other soldiers swelled forward into the room, surrounding Esperanza. Only Carla did not move.

“I am placing you under arrest,” she said evenly.

For the first time, the smile truly fell from Esperanza’s face. “I beg your pardon?” he asked, and his voice was as polite as ever, but there was an edge of confusion to it. And something else, too. Sylvie found that she was holding her breath.

“By the power of the House Dormentaire, I hereby arrest you for your crimes of last year. Namely, for the obstruction of justice and the harboring of a fugitive, Monica Campanella, who killed your parents and sister along with the eldest son of the House Dormentaire eleven years ago.”

Sylvie pressed her hands to her mouth to stifle a gasp and turned wide eyes towards the count. His mild countenance was gone, replaced by something unreadable. “Explain yourself, please,” he said in a strained voice, his eyes never leaving Carla’s face.

“There is nothing to explain.”

“Nothing to _explain_?” Esperanza demanded, raising his voice ever so slightly. When one of the soldiers reached out as if to subdue him, Esperanza swatted his hand away sharply and glowered. “Do not touch me!”

The rest of the soldiers reached for their blades, and a chorus of feminine gasps erupted from the door to the kitchen, where a handful of maids stood watching. Sylvie flinched in her seat and covered her eyes. But the sounds of violence she expected never came. When she lowered her hands, blinking away anxious tears, she found that Esperanza was looking between Carla, Sylvie, and his servants with anguish on his face. At last, his shoulders slumped.

“Very well,” he said, and raised his hands in surrender. He spoke politely once more, but where his voice had been light before, it was now slow and weighed down with defeat. “Carla, please forgive my impulsive reaction. I will not disgrace your sight, nor the sight of the other young women present, with violence, and will instead go quietly.”

“I appreciate it,” Carla said, and nodded once more to the first soldier who had moved, who bound Esperanza’s wrists behind him. To the rest, she swiftly issued orders to set up a guard on the manor. Esperanza turned to Sylvie as she did.

“Miss Sylvie, I apologize for subjecting you to such a troubling sight during your breakfast.”

Dumbfounded, Sylvie could only shake her head to deny the need for an apology.

“I wish you well. I wish all of you well,” he added, turning his gaze towards the kitchen. “Please… tell the rest.”

“We will, my lord,” a wavering voice answered.

At that, Esperanza’s face relaxed into a smile once more—though it was a pained one—and he turned to Carla. “I do not wish to delay you in your duty any further. Shall we go?”

The woman gave him a long stare before turning on her heel and leading him out of the dining room and out of the manor.

Left behind, Esperanza’s servants were stunned. Some of the women in the kitchen began to cry; others comforted them in whispering voices. Sylvie, lacking their camaraderie, could only sit where she was. Even from her lowly position, she knew some of the significance of what she’d just seen. How could she not? The Dormentaire invasion had been on everyone’s mind for two years now. There was no denying that this would serve as a _coup de grace_.

But Sylvie didn’t know—she couldn’t know—all of it.

She didn’t know what the Dormentaires had in mind for Lotto Valentino.

And she didn’t know—how could she have known?—that the darkness about to fall over the city had already reached out a hand to pull her, and her beloved Gretto, into its grasp.


	7. Chapter 3: Dangerous

_The previous night_

“Pardon my interruption, Khan. I have a message for you that Lady Lucrezia asked me to pass on right away.”

“Speak, then.” Silk neither voiced its irritation nor made any particular effort to conceal it. It ought to have been accustomed to Lucrezia’s whims at this point, having tolerated them for upwards of a year as she demanded increasingly broad tours of the Neath yet somehow avoided the Judgments’ wrath each time she returned. At the very least, it had come to respect her as one respected a particularly potent poison. But with time it only liked her less and less. This was an accomplishment in and of itself: it had liked her very little to begin with.

The masked bargainer continued. “Within a few days’ time, a ship called the Advenna Avis will enter Lotto Valentino’s harbor. A number of alchemists from the Third Library will board and depart for the New World. Lady Lucrezia asked me to communicate to you that the city must not fall until after the alchemists have left.”

Beneath its cloak, Silk narrowed its eyes. “Until they’ve left? The two of you have insisted for months now that the alchemists are the city’s primary selling point. Now you wish to let them escape?”

“There are other alchemists in the city,” he answered smoothly. “Not all of those from the Third Library will make their escape, and there are other strongholds as well—those employed at the Meyer workshop rather than the Third Library, for instance. Furthermore, Lady Lucrezia intends to place a spy aboard the ship and maintain communication with them once they reach the new world. Would not such a connection benefit the Neath and the Bazaar as well?”

If she could maintain such communication, Silk supposed it would, but passing messages between the Neath and the Surface often proved clumsy for such intentions. Moreover, Silk didn’t care whether such connections were maintained or not. It might even be interesting to see one of the Dormentaire woman’s willful little plans fall through.

There was still, however, the matter of the bargain to begin with. Its eyes yet narrowed, Silk regarded the masked man.

“You recall, of course, that there will be consequences if I find any hint of deception. If you want to see your beloved again, you would do well to curb some of Lady Dormentaire’s more outlandish requests.”

He gave another shallow bow. “I will do what I can,” he said. “Are we in agreement, then, that Lotto Valentino will not fall until after the Advenna Avis’s departure?”

“Lotto Valentino falls in a week’s time,” Silk answered. “If you want the ship to depart, make sure it does so before then.”

“Understood,” the masked bargainer said with another bow. Then, before Silk could sweep away, he spoke once again, sounding apologetic.

“There is one more thing…”

Silk waited, not happily.

“It is a difficult question for me to ask, but: is it yet possible to change the love story that will anchor the Fifth City?”

“…What?”

The masked figure in front of it spoke haltingly, almost wistfully. “Upon my return to the city, I met a young couple faced with terrible misfortune. He is a nobleman’s son and she was a servant in his household—that is, until his father discovered the affair and condemned it. He sold the woman and has forbidden the two to meet. They are heartbroken to be separated by station in such a manner.”

Silk made a sour face beneath its cloak. The tale was almost disgustingly familiar. But this lovesick fool of a man couldn’t possibly mean what it seemed like he meant. “What of them?” Silk prompted impatiently.

The masked figure looked down at his hand in thought. “Seeing their distress, I was reminded of myself, but also convicted of a sort of selfishness. I’ve spent this past year trying to bring back the dead while the living suffer on. What makes my happiness more important than theirs? Would Monica want to be brought back to life at such an expense?” He shook his head, if not in answer to his own question then in distaste for himself. “I cannot bring myself to do it. Please—let me use the Bazaar’s power for someone more deserving than myself.”

Silk gaped at him, its bound wings creaking in anger and its talons aching with the desire to slice. It spoke in a dangerously quiet voice. “For a year, you have courted my attentions for the sake of your beloved’s life. I have sent Drownies to retrieve her, I have had her body preserved in the Neath for these many months, I have tolerated the whims of the Dormentaire woman, and now you tell me that you want to use your bargain for someone else’s sake? Do I need to repeat myself? If you aim to deceive me, you _will_ regret it!”

The masked figure winced. “It’s foolish, isn’t it?” His voice sounded rueful. “But I assure you that I have no intention to deceive. —How can I explain my change of heart? Time does its work, whether that be cruel or kind. My grief has faded. I can no longer lie to myself and say that I would be justified to bring Monica back to life, not when those that still have life are in pain. Please,” he said once more.

The mask yet hid his face, but he sounded sincere. Silk regarded him with disgust. It was tempted—sorely tempted—to hang the idea of love stories altogether and drag Lotto Valentino down into the Neath without such an anchor. But the Bazaar was wary of Silk to begin with, after the bargain for the Third City, and to present another city without a true love story would perhaps be Silk’s doom. It thought of drowning in its employer’s self-indulgent melancholia and suppressed a shudder. Nothing was worth subjecting itself to that.

“Very well,” it said at last. “I will consider it. But take care that you and Lady Dormentaire make no further changes, or the bargain is off.”

“Understood. Thank you,” the masked bargainer answered, relief and gratitude obvious in his voice.

Finally out of patience for humans and their trivialities and caprice, and plagued with a sudden uncertain misery, Silk brushed past without a word of farewell. It did not stay to see the cloaked figure remove his mask, revealing not the keen, careful face of Huey Laforet but a face twisted with joyous enthusiasm. It did not hear as, minutes later, Lebreau Fermet Viralesque began to laugh to himself once more before finally heading home.

⇔

The news of Count Boronial’s arrest spread through Lotto Valentino like a spring flood. By noon, it seemed, everyone knew: the city was under Dormentaire control. A palpable unease filled the streets, and by afternoon most had retreated to the safety and certainty of their homes; the marketplace stood nearly empty, with only a few Dormentaire associates and particularly stubborn merchants milling about. Night crept over the city like the threat of a storm, and only children who were too young to comprehend what had happened were granted restful sleep.

The sun rose the next morning over a cowed city. On the hill at the edge of town, the nobles’ mansions seemed to shrink back into the overcast sky, but the Boronial manor—even emptied of its master—was larger and prouder and seemed to stand tall, overlooking the city’s frightened streets with a resigned but unwavering sadness.

Such was the view from the harbor, at least. The Dormentaire soldiers left at the gate to the manor had no such vantage point and were, instead, bored. There would be no attack here; the greatest threat to Count Boronial had already come to swallow him up. If Lotto Valentino held anyone vengeful rather than cowardly, they wouldn’t come here for their revenge.

But Carla had insisted on the guard, and so the guard was there.

It was mid-morning on the day after Esperanza’s arrest before anyone even approached. The interloper was a young woman with chestnut-brown hair and a reserved face. She raised her hand and waved as she drew near. The guards nodded back. They knew this woman: she was one of the Dormentaires’ spies in the city.

“What do you need, Niki?” the taller guard asked.

“I’ve been sent with a request.”

The woman called Niki reached into the pocket of her dress and offered him a letter. The wax seal on the envelope was stamped with the hourglass crest of the Dormentaires; the tall guard broke it after a cursory glance and pulled out the letter contained within as Niki stated her business aloud:

“There should be a servant girl here by the name of Sylvie Lumiere. I’ve been asked to escort her across town to the Meyer alchemical workshop.”

“The Meyer workshop?” The shorter guard peered at her. “Why?”

“I didn’t ask for a reason,” Niki responded, her face unchanging.

“They’re with the House Avaro, right?” the taller guard pointed out. “Maybe there’s some kind of bargain going on, to get them under control too?”

The shorter scoffed. “Does Lady Lucrezia make bargains?”

“Oh, she does,” the taller assured his companion with a chuckle. “It’s just that no one who deals with her ever realizes that the terms are all in her favor until it’s too late for them.”

Niki stared into middle distance as if allowing their chit-chat to pass in one ear and out the other.

The taller guard shrugged and checked the signature on the letter: the name Lebreau Fermet Viralesque was written in a restrained, even script. Another one of their spies, he had been granted the Dormentaire seal some years ago and remained trustworthy since. It seemed this was genuine.

“Sylvie Lumiere, huh?” The taller guard nodded to his companion. “All right, go fetch.”

The shorter grumbled at the phrasing, but he turned towards the manor and marched down the hedge-lined pathway. Niki watched him go, her face unreadable.

“Something wrong?” the guard asked, eying her.

Niki shook her head. “Just memories.”

She had been to the Boronial manor before.

One fateful evening six years ago, she had by chance met a boy who was new to the city and needed directions to the manor. Given that he’d just pulled her away from a certain beating and furthermore didn’t seem inclined to let go of her hand, she’d showed him, never imagining how that simple act would change her fate.

Back then, the idea that her fate could have changed had been beyond her imagining. Every day, she suffered as a slave in the alchemists’ drug trade, bringing the product to those who had purchased it by pretending to purchase her, watching her friends fall victim to the drug’s effects. The misery became inescapably monotonous after a while. She had thought it was her fate to die—

And then the boy—Elmer C. Albatross—had pulled her into the manor, and the count had welcomed her into the warmth and light of his home, and for a few days she had almost been… happy. She had almost believed that happiness was a possibility, even for her.

For that, she was more grateful to the count than she could have expressed, but the few short days she had spent in his presence had not been enough to change her heart. She had known it was still her fate to die as her companions had. She did not speak of this to Esperanza, but Elmer—never one to leave well enough alone when someone was troubled—had coaxed the words out of her. And then, as if he’d understood, he neither contradicted her nor tried to change her mind. He only opened her eyes to the freedom she had for the first time in her life—the freedom to choose how her life would play out from here.

With that freedom in mind, Niki had left Lotto Valentino behind her, resolved to find a place where she could die happily.

But now she was back, and now—

Now things were different.

⇔

Sylvie was brought out from the manor and handed over to Niki. If the guards noticed the look of recognition in her eyes, they decided it was none of their business; regardless, Sylvie didn’t speak openly until they were some distance away from the manor.

“You’re… Elmer’s friend, aren’t you?” she said at last, quietly. “Miss Niki?”

“Just ‘Niki’ is fine,” she answered. “And yes, Elmer is… a friend of mine. I’m sorry if he upset you at all yesterday. He doesn’t really think things through sometimes.”

“N-no, I’m sure his heart is in the right place!”

 _Doubt it_ , Niki thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. It would have sounded resentful, and that wasn’t how she felt. Elmer was Elmer, and Niki was better-equipped than most to deal with him. He was probably a little too much for an earnest girl like Sylvie.

“Anyway, if he ever does bother you, just tell him so. I can’t guarantee he’ll back off, but he’ll at least stop doing what he’s doing.”

“I… see.”

Silence for a few moments. Then, with more hesitation in her voice, Sylvie asked, “Do you work at… the Meyer workshop, Mi—Niki?”

“Yes. I’m something like a nanny for young Master Czeslaw and Lucien.”

“And that’s where you’re bringing me?”

“Yes,” Niki said, and waited for the next obvious question. But it never came. And when she looked back, she saw that Sylvie was biting her lip anxiously. She looked away when Niki met her eyes.

_Ah… she’s scared._

_Scared that if she asks why I’m bringing her there, I’ll give her an answer she doesn’t want to hear._

She was wasting her fear. If all went well, Gretto would be waiting for her at the studio when they arrived—Fermet was bringing him, in the hope of reuniting a couple separated by tragic circumstances. He’d told Niki their story with sympathy on his face, and written and sealed the letter for Niki to show to the guards. Niki felt her cheeks flush as she accepted the letter. He described it as a personal selfishness; this had nothing to do with the House Dormentaire’s will, but he trusted Niki to aid him anyway.

And so, there was never any question but that she would aid him.

Silence passed between the two young women for a moment. Finally, Sylvie spoke on a different subject, as if the hope of seeing her lover was too much for her to bear.

“Those guards acted like they knew you,” she said. Niki glanced back once more. Sylvie looked puzzled. “Do you… work with the House Dormentaire? I thought the Meyer workshop was in our—I mean, in the House Avaro’s pay.”

Niki looked forward again. “It’s complicated,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t mean to pry,” Sylvie assured her hurriedly. “It’s just—I wondered, do you know anything about what’s happened to the Count?”

Niki swallowed a sigh, and for a moment, her shoulders drooped.

She had heard about the arrest yesterday, from Fermet. He’d sat her down over lunch with an unusually solemn look on his face. “Niki, please don’t be too upset, but… there’s a rumor that Dormentaire soldiers arrested Count Boronial an hour ago.”

Her surprise must have shown on her face, because he touched her hand gently. “He wasn’t hurt—it’s my understanding that he went quietly. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t alone when you heard. I know that the count holds a special place in your heart.”

“He was… very kind to me,” Niki said, and she didn’t need to add that his kindness came at a time when she was completely unfamiliar with such treatment. Fermet knew her story already; he listened whenever it spilled out of her in bits and pieces. She didn’t need to repeat it. So instead she asked, “What do they plan to do with him?”

“I don’t know,” Fermet confessed, his face troubled. “This essentially secures the Dormentaire hold over the city, but I don’t know whether they’ll want to make it official…”

“By killing him?” Niki asked, and she was surprised to hear her voice tremble. Why did she care? She was a spy for the Dormentaires; this should have been good news for her. But she could never wish Esperanza ill.

Sensing her worry, Fermet took her hand. “I don’t think it will come to that,” he said firmly. “At the very least, not without a proper trial in Spain. The House Boronial is not so weak that their heir could be so openly assassinated, after all. I simply wonder how much Lady Lucrezia will toy with him before proceeding. There’s nothing to fear, Niki.”

Because he’d said it so gently, his voice soft when he spoke her name, she believed him. And now she recognized the concern on Sylvie’s face as mirroring her own—so she offered the same reassurance to her, though it revealed her alliance a bit too clearly: “The Count will be fine. The House Dormentaire has no plans to harm him.”

Sylvie gave an open sigh of relief. “Thank you, Niki. I appreciate it.”

⇔

_Around the same time, aboard the Dormentaire ship_

Of course, “fine” was a relative term, and the deposed Count Boronial had certainly been better. When a female voice called, “Dinner!” he only sent a sidelong glance at the entrance to his cell. The room was outfitted as finely as any other cabin aboard the Dormentaire ship, and it was comfortable, even pleasant, but where there should have been a solid door, there were iron bars instead.

The door opened and in marched Carla, her back straight. She did not look at Esperanza. Instead she held the door open for another woman, who entered with a lither gait, bearing a tray. Carla bowed as the woman passed her and then left the room, swinging the door shut behind her. The two were, ostensibly, alone. But there was no privacy: they would be heard through the bars.

Lucrezia de Dormentaire was as beautiful as always. Even as he rose to his feet automatically, Esperanza closed his eyes for the briefest of moments, a sigh lodged in the back of his throat. With his eyes shut, he could almost wish that Lucrezia were a man; if she had been a man, he could have thundered and demanded an explanation, even a duel; he could have allowed his rage to live instead of feeling it roll over and die in the pit of his stomach.

But when he opened his eyes again, she was as womanly as ever, lovely and worthy of happiness.

She was looking at him with a soft smile that combined amusement with pity. “It’s been a while, Espy,” she said. “I see you haven’t changed. It’s gotten you in a bit of trouble this time, hasn’t it?”

She set the tray down on the small table in the corner of the room. There were two plates, not just one. She intended to eat with him. His body betrayed him: at once, he gestured to the chair he had previously occupied. “Please, have a seat,” he said. “The edge of the bed will be enough for me.”

He cursed himself inwardly for the polite turn of phrase, but Lucrezia’s smile in return was gratifying.

“You’re very kind,” she said coyly, and sat.

The food she had brought was a meal for aristocrats, not for a prisoner. On each plate sat a filet of _orata_ —doubtlessly fished from the waters around Lotto Valentino—drizzled with a dark sauce. A scattering of pomegranate seeds, almost certainly from the orchards outside the city, served as an artistic garnish. When Lucrezia uncorked the bottle of wine and began to pour a glass for each of them, Esperanza recognized it from his own cellar.

She lifted her glass to him before taking a sip. “You realize, of course, that I sent Carla to this city on purpose.”

“You would have been foolish to do otherwise,” Esperanza answered. His voice should have been wooden. Instead, it flowed graciously from his lips.

“Mmhmm. To say nothing of sending her to arrest you—it made things ever so much easier, don’t you think?”

Esperanza frowned, not particularly wanting to recall the previous day’s events. “Even if I had resisted, the violence would have meant ill for Lotto Valentino as clearly as my arrest does.”

“Oh my, you’re right.” It was impossible to tell whether this was truly just occurring to her. “So you _were_ thinking ahead when you surrendered?”

A long pause, and then Esperanza sighed deeply and shook his head. No, he’d only been thinking of Carla, of Sylvie and the other servants. In the chaos of the moment, Lotto Valentino had been a secondary concern. Perhaps it was a miracle he’d held his position for as long as he had.

Lucrezia clicked her tongue in sympathy. “You’re very honest, Espy. I do like that. I hope you don’t resent Carla for this, though? I don’t think the poor thing is very happy about it, to tell the truth.”

“I could never resent a woman for such a thing.” In fact, it seemed that he couldn’t resent a woman for anything. He pinched his fingers around the stem of his wine glass, but didn’t lift it just yet. “At the same time, I wonder how you can allow yourself to wound the heart of a woman entrusted to you in such a manner.”

“Oh, that’s simple,” Lucrezia answered with a dazzling smile. “I do it for the sake of my own desires, so I’m content. But you needn’t worry about it, Espy: after all, I’m a woman too, am I not? More of a woman than she is, in some eyes, even if you and I don’t give a fig for such matters…” She raised an eyebrow. “Actually, I’ve wondered that for a while: whatever do you do, dear Espy, when two women’s desires contradict each other?”

Esperanza shook his head. He had no answer for her. Elmer had proposed similar thought experiments in the past, but he had no inclination to dredge through his memories to recall his conclusion right now.

Lucrezia nodded as if she understood perfectly and began to eat her _orata_. “You see, that’s why it’s useless to live in service to anyone else’s whims. Follow your own desires, darling, and you’ll never waver.”

“That certainly is advice befitting the House Dormentaire.”

“It’s served us very well,” Lucrezia said, a sentence that may have sounded modest coming from someone else. But nothing sounded modest on her lips. “Is the House Boronial really any different, though?”

“You have robbed me of the right to comment on the motives of the House Boronial,” Esperanza replied flatly.

She glanced at his face before shrugging and making a quiet hum of agreement. Then she gestured with her fork to his plate. “Do eat, Espy, I had this specially prepared for the two of us.”

Another sigh. He picked up his fork. “I cannot refuse a lady’s hospitality.”

“I know,” she answered, sing-song.

He began to eat. The fish was delicious, and he told her so. She smiled.

“I’ll pass on your compliments to the chef, if I don’t forget. But you wouldn’t mind if I do forget, would you? Since he’s a man.”

“You do enjoy teasing, don’t you,” he said, dodging her question.

“If I say yes, will you let me keep doing it, darling Espy?”

He took another sip of his wine rather than answering. They both knew what he would have said, anyway. She was utterly content, cutting off bits of her _orata_ and dipping them in some of the extra sauce on the plate before lifting them to her mouth. Esperanza asked himself again if he really believed that he was blessed simply to exist in a world where women lived, when some women were like her. But the answer was still yes.

“What desire is it that you’re following this time?” he asked finally. His stomach clenched with dark memories, but he made himself add, “It isn’t really revenge for your brother, is it?”

“Not at all.” Lucrezia waved her fork dismissively. “It makes a handy excuse, especially when it comes to arresting you, but I was after the city and the alchemists originally.”

“Originally?” Esperanza repeated after her.

“Yes, originally.” She tilted her head, puzzled. “Didn’t Huey tell you the new plan?”

Whatever vestiges of a smile might have been on Esperanza’s face merely from being in the presence of a woman were driven away by her reference to Huey Laforet. “When I saw him two days ago, he only spouted nonsense about selling the city, something about ‘transformation’ and ‘giving up the sun’…” But the words came from his mouth more and more reluctantly as he watched Lucrezia nod in response, and the suspicion that he’d been trying to quash, the suspicion that Huey was not insane but deadly serious, finally became certainty in his mind. “…Is it true?” he asked at last.

“It is!” Lucrezia looked delighted, as if they’d finally hit on a topic worthy of her interest. “Did he tell you about the Neath, then? It’s a wonderful place, you know, a little dark, but there are other advantages. _Fascinating_ people. Granted, some of them are devils, but they’re so very charming! And the Masters, you know, I think there are ten of them or so? And some of them are absolute _dears_. Silk is a bit grumpy by comparison. Ah, Silk is the one managing the sale, you see? The Khan of Silk. I should think you’ll meet him soon. If you’d listened to Huey, you would have met him in an official capacity, but, well…”

She trailed off delicately. Esperanza had sat stoically throughout her little speech, his face growing paler and paler as she went on. “If you’ll forgive me for saying so, it all still sounds like nonsense,” he told her. And yet, for all that it sounded like nonsense— _heretical_ nonsense, what with the mention of devils—he didn’t find himself disbelieving it. It was for precisely that reason that he had grown pale. He was afraid to ask his next question, but it could not be avoided: “What of my sister? Huey mentioned that she…”

“That she might be brought back to life,” Lucrezia finished for him when unease closed his throat. “That’s certainly the theory, and it’s _all_ Huey has on his mind. Poor thing. I’ve had him overseeing the takeover this past year, while I’ve been busy establishing relations with the various powers of the Neath, but I don’t think his heart’s been in it. Oh, but he’s done well enough, don’t you think?”

“My sister,” Esperanza repeated tersely. He had been a fool to ever think Huey trustworthy, or even _human_ , it seemed, but he could rage at the young man later.

“Right, your sister. —Maribel? Monica? Which do you prefer?”

Esperanza winced to hear both of her names tossed out so casually. Again, he wished he were having this conversation with a man. Or anyone but the woman who sat before him, tilting her head as if unaware of the mental turmoil she caused by her very presence. But she would not continue without his answer.

“To be very honest, I would prefer not to hear her name spoken by Dormentaire lips at all,” he said finally. “Even by a woman such as yourself.”

“‘Little Miss M,’ then?” Lucrezia said, and he had no idea whether she was mocking him this time or simply speaking with her normal caprice. “You want to ask if it’s true, don’t you? If she can really be brought back to life? That sounds the most nonsensical of all, I’m sure, but I don’t think it is. You see, death doesn’t quite work properly in the Neath. It still works a _little_ , in most places, but not very well. People come back from being dead all the time and walk around as if nothing happened at all. If they are _especially_ close to dead, they hold themselves together with bandages and go to a place called the tomb-colonies to rot and have duels and mope around at balls, but even tomb colonists are still technically alive. Then there are Drownies, you see, people who have drowned and come back different somehow. They sing such queer songs. And the Elder Con—”

“Stop.”

Esperanza found that he was shaking. He didn’t want to think of Maribel held together by bandages, or singing unholy songs with drowned men. She was gone. He had mourned her passing for a year. The dead were meant to stay dead; he despised everyone who refused to understand that and despised himself even more for feeling a breath of hope at the thought.

But when Lucrezia opened her mouth, she protested against something far simpler than the whirling thoughts in his head.

“You interrupted me,” she said, blinking her surprise. “Surely you don’t usually interrupt women?”

The noise he made might have been one of exasperation, had she been a man. In response to a woman, it could only be called a sigh. “Forgive me,” he said, and his voice came out smoothly and sincerely.

“You aren’t even a proper _count_ anymore, and you interrupt me. That’s bold, Espy, _very_ bold.” But she smiled then—and not her usual coy smile, but something a little sad. Her voice was quieter when she spoke again. “Then again, I’ve never really held your interest, have I?”

Esperanza furrowed his brow. “You mistake me. You have my interest as all women do, Lucrezia; I wish for your happiness.”

She nodded, but not really in agreement. “Mm. You and I have very different definitions of ‘interest,’ dear.”

“I suppose we do.”

Lucrezia rested her chin in her hands for a moment, her face unusually pensive. “Just think,” she said finally, “how different things would be if neither of us had ever had siblings.”

A wry smile from Esperanza. “Have you ever heard of a noble family foolish enough to have only one child?”

“With the luck we’ve had, perhaps our parents ought to have aimed for more than two,” Lucrezia answered. Then she shrugged her shoulders to shake away the heavy weight of the past and let a smile back onto her face. Esperanza wondered, for the briefest of moments, whether Elmer would have judged that smile to be real.

“Anyway, my point, before you interrupted and we wandered terribly off-topic, was that I am fairly sure that the Bazaar will be able to bring Miss M back to life. Whether Huey—or you, for that matter—will be happy with the results, I haven’t the faintest idea, but we will know soon enough. Are you finished with your dinner?”

He gestured for her to take the tray. He had hardly touched his _orata_ , but he had no desire to keep eating. Of course, if the chef had been a woman, it would have been a different story.

“I could leave the wine?” she offered.

“No, thank you. I’d like to think about a few things.”

“Ahh, well, good for you. I think I shall take it, then.” She stood. “I’ll come by later, Espy, to keep you from getting too lonely. Or shall I send Carla in?”

One more wry smile from Esperanza. “As long as you send a woman…”

“…It doesn’t matter who, does it?” She chuckled. “Never change, Espy.”

And with that, she left his cell.

Once she had gone, Esperanza remained on the bed, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands folded tightly before his face. He could feel frustration and rage and despair settling back in already—but only because she had gone.

With a bitter sigh, he shook his head at his own habits and muttered a belated response to her admonition.

“There doesn’t seem to be any fear of that.”

⇔

When Niki and Sylvie approached the Meyer workshop, someone was leaning out the window waiting for them. Niki didn’t recognize him, but when Sylvie gasped, she knew there was only one person he could be. His eyes lit up with recognition in the same moment.

“Sylvie…!”

“Gretto!”

Sylvie nearly pushed Niki aside in her hurry to run inside and greet her lover. Niki followed at a more sedate pace, and by the time she stepped inside, the two were embracing, alternately showering each other with kisses and pulling back to look at each other as if to verify the truth. It was embarrassing to watch, but at the same time, Niki was a bit jealous.

There was someone she wouldn’t have minded holding like that.

That someone was, in fact, standing at the bottom of the stairs. His heavy bangs hid his eyes from view, but from the turn of his head, it was clear that he, too, was watching the happy couple reunite. The smile on his face revealed a gentle contentment, and relief.

When Niki had first left Lotto Valentino, when she’d followed Elmer’s suggestion to search for a place where she could die with a smile on her face—that was when she had first met Lebreau Fermet Viralesque. Somehow, she’d found herself telling him her story, and he chided her gently for the one hope she had:

“One cannot search for a place to die. It’s something you will reach, naturally, by living out your life as it comes.”

Had it come from anyone else, she might have disregarded such criticism. But Fermet was so gentle about it, and spoke to her so kindly; he offered her a position taking care of Czes, and soon Niki found herself regarding the alchemists at the Meyer workshop as a sort of family. As a place where she could belong.

And Fermet—

Every time he said her name, and every time she said his, she found herself falling a little more in love with him.

She didn’t expect anything to come of it. She’d seen couples in love and couldn’t imagine herself in such a position. So she never said anything, and if Fermet knew it, it didn’t change the way he treated her. He was as kind and supportive as ever.

Now, noticing that she was looking at him, his smile took on a different quality for a moment and he nodded up the stairs before turning and proceeding to the second floor. Niki left the two lovebirds to their joyful reunion and followed him up the stairs.

He led her into Lucien’s room and shut the door before turning a grateful smile to her.

“I can’t thank you enough, Niki.” She went to curtsey, but he held up his hand. “No, there’s no need for such formalities. If this had been official business, perhaps, but it was an utterly selfish request from me. I truly appreciate your aid in repairing the damage I wrought.”

He walked over to Lucien’s cradle and gazed at the baby’s sleeping face as he continued, his smile taking on a rueful air.

“In telling Mr. Avaro of his son’s affection for Sylvie, I had hoped that his heart might be opened to their love, but for him to instead sell Sylvie and confine Gretto… I realized my error as soon as I saw Mr. Avaro’s face. I never should have interfered. It means more to me than I can say that you were willing to help me set things right.”

“I’m glad I was able to help you, Fermet,” Niki answered, and she thought she might have meant that more sincerely than anything she’d said in her life. “You can ask me for anything.”

He looked back at her for a moment, his smile genuine. “I appreciate that, Niki.” Then he turned his gaze back to the cradle and reached down to stroke Lucien’s cheek. Niki approached the cradle as well as the baby began to make quiet sounds of waking, and Fermet reached down to lift Lucien out and place him in Niki’s arms.

“He’s really taken to you,” he said. “You have a way with children.”

Niki’s smile was mostly directed at Lucien. “I never would have learned that if it weren’t for your request to look after Czes. Thank you.”

“Not at all. You’ve helped both of us enormously. Czes is very fond of you, too.” He rested his hand on the small of Niki’s back for just a moment; then he took a few steps away and sat down in the nearby chair. As Niki watched, he directed his gaze out the window, up at the sky. He seemed troubled. After a moment, he sighed.

“Is something wrong?” Niki asked.

He looked at her silently as if considering something of great import; then, with one more sigh, he said, “Niki, I think you deserve to know what’s coming. Will you sit down?”

Obediently, Niki took a seat across from him, and he began to speak. He told her of the Dormentaires’ plan for Lotto Valentino: that they intended to offer it to some kind of monstrous creature deep in the ground, to be swallowed up by the earth. The city and all its citizens would be consumed by an enormous cavern called the Neath, cut off from the surface and doomed to a life in a darkness deeper than that of any cave. It all sounded like a fairy tale to Niki, or a horrid story to tell children to frighten them into obedience, but the gravity on Fermet’s face left her no choice but to believe him.

“I do not know what the Dormentaires hope to gain by such an exchange, but I do not doubt their willingness to make it,” Fermet said finally. “I don’t think there’s any hope of changing their minds now, not after what they did yesterday. Count Boronial’s arrest is the beginning of the end. Lotto Valentino will certainly fall.”

Niki nodded gravely. Her heart was pounding, and Lucien fussed in her arms as if picking up on her unease. She bounced him lightly in the hope of quieting him.

Fermet saw her unease as well, and gave a pained smile. “But there is still time for you to escape, Niki. You don’t have to be here when the city falls. In fact, I’m of half a mind to ask you not to be. You deserve better than to be caught up in the Dormentaires’ schemes.”

“…What do you plan to do?” Niki asked.

Fermet’s smile turned regretful. “The House Dormentaire are my employers. They have asked me to stay in the city and continue to monitor its atmosphere after the fall, as there is bound to be some unrest and dissatisfaction, and I have agreed.” He shook his head. “But Niki, that doesn’t need to matter to you. You have these few days of opportunity—say your goodbyes to Czes, to Lucien, and then leave. I can give you money, letters of introduction. Anything you need to spare yourself this fate.”

For a moment, Niki found it difficult to breathe. Her eyes stung with tears at Fermet’s kindness, at the care he was showing for her. And precisely because he was so willing to show such care, she was utterly unable to accept it. She looked down at Lucien’s sweet face, and then back up at Fermet.

“I don’t want to leave you and Czes to face that alone. If you plan to be here when the city falls, then I will be, too.”

“Niki…”

“Please let me do this, Fermet,” she said, her voice clear. “I want to stay with you.”

It was nearly a confession of her love. Her cheeks colored a bit, and Fermet was silent for a long moment, looking at her. Finally, he bowed his head.

“If that is your honest desire, I will not try to stop you. …Thank you, Niki. I’m touched that you would choose such a thing, for Czes’s sake and mine.”

Again, he fell silent, bowing his head over folded hands. But it was the silence of a man trying to find the words to continue, so Niki waited.

Finally, he raised his head again. “There is one more thing that concerns me. Little is known about how such a ‘fall’ happens, but from what I do know, it is a… a very dangerous process. The city will rearrange itself to better suit the Neath—streets will warp, and buildings will crumble. It is not safe, to be in a city as it falls. It had occurred to me that it may be safer to reach the Neath before Lotto Valentino falls at all. Niki, would you do the same?”

She nodded. “If you think it’s best, Fermet…”

“I do. I would prefer, too, that Lucien not be exposed to the horrors of that chaos at such a tender age. If you would leave early and bring the child with you, my mind would be at ease. —Here.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a small purse, and offered it to her. “This will be enough to pay for the funicular at the Travertine Spiral.”

Niki did not reach out to take the purse. She could see, from how full it was, that the amount of money he was offering her was not trivial. “I can’t accept—”

He shook his head. “Niki, please—if not for your own sake, then for Lucien’s. I can’t ask you to walk the whole way with a child in your arms. You could manage it, I’m sure,” he added, with a wry smile, “but I would feel cruel forcing you to do so.”

When she hesitated still, he stood from his chair and took a step closer to her. He took her hand and turned it upright before placing the purse in her palm. Then he closed her hand around its heavy weight and held her hand in both of his. Niki’s whole body felt warm. Looking up at him, she could almost see his eyes through his thick bangs, and she was certain that he was focused entirely on her.

“Please do this for me,” he encouraged her softly. “I’ll tell you how to find the entrance to the Neath. I have a few more duties I must complete first, but I’ll make excuses for you.”

Niki searched his face, confused. “You’re staying longer? When will you…”

“If I can get away, Czes and I will come down before the fall as well. If not, we’ll find you once Lotto Valentino has fallen.”

Her eyes widened. “But the danger, of being in the city as it falls—”

A gentle smile. “I’ll station myself near Lady Lucrezia. Nature itself wouldn’t dare to harm her.” He was still holding her hand, and now he squeezed it gently. “I promise, Niki, I will find you in the Neath, no matter what it takes. Do you trust me?”

Niki’s breath caught in her throat. Of course she trusted him: he was, perhaps, the first person she had ever been able to trust in all her life. And so she nodded, and bowed her head so that he wouldn’t see the tears starting in her eyes.

“Thank you, Fermet.”

⇔

With the matter of Niki’s escape settled, Lebreau squeezed her hand one final time before picking a book out of the shelf in the room and returning to his chair. Niki continued to cradle Lucien in her arms, and they spent some time in a companionable silence.

But though Lebreau dutifully turned the pages of his book, his mind was not on the words on the page but instead on the young woman seated across from him. He stole occasional glances at her—but only occasional ones, because with every glance it became harder to hold in his excitement and delight.

_Ah, Niki… what a beautiful thing love is, opening the hearts of the broken, offering hope to one as hopeless as you once were…_

_I can see why the Bazaar adores such stories._

His eyes flitted over towards the bookshelf, towards a certain tome—a handwritten journal in the language of the Mongols. If it had remained in the Neath, it would have been censored or destroyed for the information it contained. But some rebellious merchant had brought it to the Surface, and it had been worth what it had cost Lebreau to acquire it. None on the Surface understood the Bazaar’s deepest secrets better than he.

_Will she listen to our tale, Niki? Will she write our story on her skin?_

_It’s up to you now—it all depends on what ending you choose._

Among the information collected in the journal was a record of the Fourth City’s fall. And so, Lebreau knew: to be in one city when the next came crashing down onto it was perilous beyond words.

_Will you find yourself guided into the lacre reserves, only to have your heart burst with melancholy? Or will you avoid that fate and wander an empty city until the streets of Lotto Valentino fall into place on top of you? Will you throw yourself to the ground with dear Lucien huddled against your chest, to protect him from damage, and will he waste away beneath your corpse?_

_If by some miracle, you both survive—Niki, sweet Niki, will you give your love to me still?_

Lebreau bit down on his lip to stifle the smile creeping across his face. He was imagining the sight of Niki’s body, bloodied and bruised amongst piles of rubble in the darkness, and the sound of Lucien’s cries of distress. He was imagining finding her there, and watching relief and gratitude come to her bleary eyes as she breathed one final breath in his arms. He took a deep breath, to calm himself, and made an attempt to turn his thoughts elsewhere.

But they would not be shaken from the subject of love, not today. Downstairs, the voices of Gretto Avaro and Sylvie Lumiere could be heard vaguely. They were still exclaiming their delight, and by now, Lebreau had to assume that Gretto had shared the plan that Lebreau had suggested to him. A nobleman’s son and his serving girl—it was hardly an uncommon tale, but to those two it must have felt as new and all-encompassing as the love between Adam and Eve. And of course the Bazaar would crave a story such as theirs, would wish with all her heart for a joyful resolution for the two of them. Of course Silk had not hesitated to change the contract—their story was far more fitting to the Bazaar’s purposes than the one Huey so desperately offered.

Lebreau’s lips spread in a gentle smile, then, and he made himself turn the page to keep up the pretense. But in truth, he no longer remembered what book he was holding in his hands.

_…Huey._

_What are you feeling tonight? Are you afraid of your own hope? Are you so absorbed by it that all other thought is a struggle? What emotions, what imaginings, kindle the fire that burns in your eyes?_

_When you realize that the Bazaar isn’t bringing Monica back to you, will your face look like hers did when I killed her? Confusion—then realization—and then the blackest despair, to contrast so sharply against the brightness of your hope—_

_I can hardly wait to see it._

Another turn of the page.

Lebreau kept his gaze down, and carefully, carefully steadied his shaking fingers. A quiet breath, in and out. Across from him, Niki began to sing a soft nursery rhyme to Lucien, and Lebreau joined in on the second verse, his gentle smile never wavering.


	8. Chapter 4: Watchful

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a particularly Fermet-y passage towards the beginning of this one that can be safely skipped if necessary. Frankly, I wouldn't blame you if you did so.

The departure of the Advenna Avis was quiet.

A number of alchemists had expected resistance—from the restless vigilantes who still prowled the city, dodging the eyes of the Dormentaires, or from the Dormentaires themselves. In fact, the Dormentaires had demanded a copy of the Advenna Avis’s passenger list, and with the rumors that they had been after the secrets of alchemy all along, even Maiza had worried that they would try to prevent the ship from leaving.

But this morning, Carla had returned the list to him, marked with the Dormentaires’ stamp of approval. With a few brief words, she assured him that the Advenna Avis was cleared to depart in the evening.

And now evening had come, and as the sun sank in the sky, Maiza couldn’t help but find eerie the ease of it all.

_Is it going to be this simple?_

_To leave Lotto Valentino—leave the only life I know—behind me? To board this ship to the New World and summon the devil who will grant us the Grand Panacea?_

He had spent so much time planning for this day with Dalton that the lack of resistance seemed unreal.

And so, when the unexpected happened, he was not caught fully off-guard.

Two figures made their way onto the ship. They were not completely unknown to Maiza, but he was sure they didn’t belong here. He hurried towards them and spoke.

“Victor Talbot, isn’t it? And Szilard Quates? What are you doing here?”

“Maiza.” Szilard, the older of the two, nodded in greeting. “This young idiot and I will be accompanying you on the Advenna Avis, by order of Lucrezia de Dormentaire.”

Maiza’s eyes narrowed, even as understanding settled into place.

_Ah, so this is why there was no resistance from the Dormentaires… They plan to have their spies on board._

It made sense in precisely the way that the quiet of the evening did not. Still, the Advenna Avis could not be so trivially boarded. Speaking as politely as always, Maiza said, “There appears to be some confusion. I’m afraid that passage on this ship is limited to those whose names are the passenger list, which was cleared by the House Dormentaire just this morning…”

Szilard tapped his cane against the deck of the ship. “And have you not looked at it since having it returned?”

Maiza frowned. Half to himself, he said, “Carla didn’t mention any changes…”

But he took the parchment out of his pocket and broke the wax seal upon it. Opening it up, he found his eyes widening in surprise.

The names of Victor Talbot and Szilard Quates had been added to the bottom in elegant handwriting that looked like it might have belonged to a woman. And next to each of them, in a familiar, blocky hand, were Dalton’s initials, approving the change.

“Well?” Victor asked, impatient. But he didn’t sound angry, and when Maiza looked up again, he found that Victor was grinning knowingly.

“…Forgive me,” Maiza said. He folded the passenger list once more and returned it to his pocket. “Victor, Szilard, you are both welcome aboard.”

“That’s more like it.”

Shouldering their bags, the two Dormentaire alchemists walked past Maiza, headed below deck. Maiza watched them go, a chill traveling down his back.

It was not their presence that made him uneasy, nor the hand that the Dormentaires had in getting them aboard; he was troubled by his teacher’s initials next to their names. How had Dalton come to know of their plan, and why had he signed off on it without informing Maiza? What was _his_ hand in all of this?

Maiza had known that by boarding the Advenna Avis, he would be involving himself in something enormous.

But now, he was forced to question if perhaps his part in this scheme was smaller than he had thought. And if that was the case, could he truly be sure about the role he was to play?

 

Before his doubts had cleared, he heard a voice by his side.

“Maiza…”

Turning, he found Gretto and Sylvie standing there, hand in hand. Their faces were solemn, but Gretto’s eyes shone stronger than they ever had before as he gazed at his older brother.

Gretto squeezed Sylvie’s hand and spoke again. “Thank you. We won’t waste this chance you’ve given us.”

Maiza saw the new strength in Gretto’s eyes and the joy that passed between him and Sylvie, and part of his worries faded away.

He had learned that Gretto had escaped from the guard their father had placed on him in the manor, and that he was at the Meyer workshop, at nearly the same time. The latter information had been brought to him by his friend Fermet, and with that news, Fermet brought a request.

_“Will you let your brother and his beloved board the Advenna Avis with you?”_

Maiza had been against it at first, but Fermet had built his case with steady determination: with the city fallen to Dormentaire control, there was little need for Gretto to remain behind only to play yes-man to their whims, and he deserved a chance to lead his own life. To stay in Lotto Valentino, with the father who had punished him so brutally for his first love, would only rob him of the chance to grow.

Not fond of their father himself, Maiza had found it surprisingly easy to be convinced, and Dalton had had no objections. And so it happened that Gretto and Sylvie, too, would travel across the Atlantic Ocean to begin their life together in the New World.

Having expressed their gratitude, Gretto and Sylvie followed the two Dormentaire alchemists below deck, and Maiza allowed himself a moment of genuine hope—for his brother’s future, and for the future of all the alchemists on board and their potential to change the world.

 

Thus the Advenna Avis left Lotto Valentino behind, on a night utterly devoid of incident—

Not one passenger aware of the darkness they were so narrowly escaping, or the tragedy they were sailing towards.

⇔

As the ship sailed away from Lotto Valentino, one man followed it in his mind.

Lebreau Fermet Viralesque sat in the Meyer workshop with Czeslaw curled up next to him, gazing out the window at the darkening sky. Earlier, Begg Garott had said his goodbyes, and poor Czes had done his best not to show how devastated he was. But it seemed that the effort of holding in his tears had exhausted him, because now he was drifting off, every now and again his head bobbing up with a moment of consciousness before sleep sank back in.

Lebreau turned his gaze towards the harbor with an idle smile on his face. In truth, he half-wished that he and Czes hadn’t had to part ways with Begg at all. He would have liked to bring Czes aboard the Advenna Avis; would have liked to watch the boy drink the Grand Panacea and preserve himself just as he was now, in this sweet, perfect state; would have liked to spend years, decades, _centuries_ breaking Czes and adoring him over and over. Lebreau imagined it as he stroked the sleeping boy’s hair and let out a wistful sigh.

Alas, he still had business to take care of in Lotto Valentino first. In three days, the Bazaar would stake its claim on the city, and despair would spread like a dark cloud:

The despair of its citizens as the ground closed in over their heads, blocking out sunlight like a tomb.

The despair of Huey Laforet, when he realized that all his scheming and bargaining had come to naught, that he had sold his home for someone else’s love story.

And the despair of the Echo Bazaar, when it realized that the subjects of its newest love story had vanished from the city half a week before it fell.

Lebreau closed his eyes and tried to imagine what such despair would look like on a creature so inhuman, so powerful and yet so vulnerable at the same time. Would it be something that the human eye could see? Or would it instead seep into the hearts of those nearby, irresistibly? Would the Bazaar’s heartsick tears gush forth, filling the streets of the newly fallen city with an ill-smelling melancholy, dooming the Fifth City as soon as its new life began?

Lebreau tried to imagine it, but he didn’t know enough to say for sure.

And so he’d had no choice but to stay behind to see for himself.

Beside him, Czes shifted so that one arm was wrapped around Lebreau’s waist, his breath still peaceful with sleep. The eager look on Lebreau’s face softened, replaced by a gentle fondness.

“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “I won’t leave you behind, Czes.”

As long as Czes was with him, it was worth it to miss out on this chance for immortal life.

After all, who could say what kind of future the Neath held for the two of them?

⇔

Time passed uneasily in Lotto Valentino. If the citizens had expected some form of swift oppression after the Dormentaire takeover, their expectations were baffled. Besides the departure of the Advenna Avis, there was no activity in the harbor; there was no appointment of a puppet governor. The local police were newly required to report to the Dormentaires’ soldiers, but no particular action was ordered—not against the alchemists, not against the remaining noble families, not even against any Mask Makers who still might have been in hiding.

There was only one change in the city, and it was so slight that it was only noticed by those who were already on edge: for some reason, the occasional bat could be seen flitting from building to building in broad daylight, or hanging from the signs above storefronts.

But that, surely, had nothing to do with the Dormentaires.

⇔

_Evening, a few days later_

A week after the anniversary of Monica’s death, Elmer made his way to what had been, until very recently, the Boronial manor. The soldiers staked outside nodded their recognition and allowed him to pass. His first stop was the servants’ quarters, but it was a disappointment: most of the maids were still upset about Esperanza’s arrest, and though they tried to smile for him, there was no real joy in their eyes. Under any other circumstances, Elmer would have stayed a little longer to try to cheer them up, but tonight there was someone waiting for him. So he waved goodbye and made his way up to the balcony that overlooked the city.

There, he found two figures rather than just the one. And the one who caught his eye first—

“Hey, it’s you!” he exclaimed.

The tall, cloaked figure turned towards him in what he had to assume was surprise. Elmer still couldn’t see its face beneath its hood. He didn’t get the feeling that it was smiling, though.

“Any luck finishing up your business like you wanted to?” Elmer asked.

“I should be making progress on that tonight,” Mr. Veils responded in its high, thin voice.

Elmer grinned. “That’s great! Give me a smile, then?”

But before it could do so, the other figure on the balcony spoke. “Khan…”

Mr. Veils turned towards the other figure—Huey Laforet, who was looking at the city through a spyglass. He pointed towards the east end of the city. “There, in front of the patisserie.”

“I see.”

Mr. Veils nodded once in response to whatever Huey had pointed out to him, and then, in a black movement that Elmer couldn’t quite follow with his eyes, took off. A shadow passed over the city, and once again, Elmer had the sense that this was precisely what the cloaked figure enjoyed. He walked forward and leaned on the balcony rail to watch.

Next to him, Huey continued to peer through the spyglass, but he spoke to Elmer. “When did you meet the Khan of Silk?”

“Oh, you mean Mr. Veils? A few nights ago, I guess. But it’s been flying around Lotto Valentino for a few weeks now. It’s scaring people a little, so I thought I’d investigate.”

A nod from Huey, and the barest hint of a self-mocking smile on his face—too slight to be called out, because if Elmer called attention to it, it would vanish.

“I shouldn’t be surprised, considering your habit of sticking your nose into everyone’s business. Carla tells me you’ve been spying for the Dormentaires, too.”

“Well, you know. She doesn’t smile much,” Elmer said by way of explanation.

“I’ve noticed that. She seems particularly ill-disposed towards me, but considering the assault on the Dormentaire ships last year and the fact that I snuck into Lucrezia’s bedroom uninvited, that can’t be helped.”

Finally, Huey shut the spyglass and turned towards Elmer. A wistful smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “It’s good to see you again, Elmer.”

Elmer grinned to see Huey’s smile. “You too! I got your note.”

A few days ago, before the departure of the Advenna Avis, Dalton had handed Elmer a brief letter written in Huey’s handwriting: _If you choose not to board the Advenna Avis, join me on the Count’s balcony on Sunday evening. I have a promise to keep._

“I wasn’t sure whether you’d come,” Huey confessed. But Elmer raised one eyebrow.

“That’s a lie, right?” he said. “You know I’m not going to let you skip out on your debt. You owe me a smile.”

Huey pointed out, “If you became immortal, you’d be able to see an eternity’s worth of smiles, not just mine.”

Elmer shrugged. He was still grinning. “Yeah, but there’s always a chance I could stumble across that later. I’m not going to miss my one chance to see the greatest smile of your life.”

“Your optimism is as incredible as always,” Huey said wryly. But he didn’t deny that he’d reached exactly the conclusion Elmer had described. Instead, he turned his gaze back towards the city as if embarrassed to point the smile on his face at Elmer directly.

When he didn’t speak again, Elmer pressed, “That is the promise you’re talking about, right?”

It was two promises, in fact, inextricably intertwined: his promise to Monica, sworn in response to her last words, that he would see her again; and his promise to Elmer, to show him the greatest smile of his life once he and Monica were reunited. When Elmer had seen Huey last, it had been clear that nothing in the world mattered to him more than those promises.

Now, as Elmer watched, the smile slipped from Huey’s face, replaced by a look of deep concentration. With a deep breath, he turned back towards Elmer.

“I’ve found a way to bring her back.”

Speaking steadily, he explained: the Echo Bazaar and its devotion to love stories, his bargain with Lucrezia de Dormentaire, the business that Mr. Veils had with the city. Elmer took it all in silently, only speaking once Huey was finished.

“So, in exchange for Monica’s life, Lotto Valentino and everyone in the city is going to be dragged underground for good?”

Huey nodded, and Elmer gave an exaggerated sigh.

“As if they weren’t already bad enough at smiling. Do you have any idea how many people you’re going to be making unhappy?” He shook his head. “It’s a good thing I stayed behind.”

“Sorry,” Huey said, though he looked more amused than sorry. Which was what Elmer preferred, anyway.

Chuckling, Elmer said, “Well, don’t worry about it. As long as I get to see your smile tonight, I’m sure the rest will all work out in the end.”

Huey nodded, and then his smile faded once again as he turned towards the city below. Elmer watched his face, trying to figure out why his smiles were so transient. They kept being swallowed up by something else—something that wasn’t the desperation he’d felt when Monica vanished from the city or the stoicism he tried to build at other times. Then, as Huey took his spyglass back out and pointed it at the city below, Elmer identified the emotion that darkened his face:

He was afraid.

He was so hopeful that he was _terrified_.

And so Elmer chose to elbow him in the ribs.

“C’mon, Huey, cheer up! You said the city falls tonight, right? You’ll see her again soon! Nothing’s going to stop you now! I’ll take your best smile later, but that’s no reason you can’t smile in the meantime, too.”

Huey didn’t turn his way, and kept his spyglass trained on the east end of the city—the same area he had pointed Mr. Veils to just a few minutes ago.

Then he gave a deep sigh, and his shoulders twitched in an involuntary shudder.

“To be honest, there was an uncomfortably close call.”

⇔

_The previous afternoon: aboard the Dormentaire ship_

“Everything seems to be in order. The Bazaar will take the city tomorrow evening, then.”

The Khan of Silk collected the papers it had spread out on the table as Lucrezia answered with one of her bright smiles. “Fantastic. Thank you ever so much, Silk, dear.”

Behind his mask, Huey was not smiling as brightly as she was, but his heart raced with eagerness at the thought that he would see Monica again within a day. So his attention was elsewhere when Silk turned its hooded face towards him.

“Incidentally, when do you intend to introduce me to the new couple?”

Huey focused his mind on the present and frowned in confusion. “I’m sorry, what do you mean?”

Silk made an impatient gesture. “The new couple. The noble and his maid that you spoke of some days ago. You wished to change our contract so as to offer them a chance of being together, did you not?”

Huey shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Was this meant to be some kind of joke? If it had come from Lucrezia, he hardly would have batted an eye at her cruel jests, but a single glance in her direction confirmed that she was as baffled as he was, and Silk wasn’t the type to joke. “I’ve never mentioned a couple like that.”

“The same night you asked me to wait until the Advenna Avis departed, you asked me to change the contract.”

“I didn’t…” Huey shook his head again, but this time he was hardly aware of it. There was a horrible sense of premonition churning in his stomach, and all his attempts to wrap his head around what Silk meant were falling short.

Seeing that he was somewhat handicapped, Lucrezia spoke. “Silk, darling, we’re going to need a bit more of an explanation than that,” she said, her voice as light as ever, but her eyes serious and calculating.

Silk looked between the two of them in obvious irritation. “One week ago, a man came to me in that same absurd getup you insist upon wearing and requested that I rewrite the contract such that the love story at the heart of the Fifth City will be that of a young noble and the maid he is in love with. Was that not you?”

“Of course not!” Huey answered at once, his voice coming out louder than he meant it to. “I would never—what about Monica?”

“You said that you would prefer to use the Bazaar’s power on those still living, instead of on the dead.”

_Like hell I did!_

Huey wanted to shout it, to do whatever it would take to clear up this misunderstanding, but his throat was closed with terror. His heart thudded painfully in his chest, and it was a struggle just to breathe.

Lucrezia still maintained her composure; she only gave an indulgent sigh. “I think someone’s played you, Silk,” she said. “Huey would never say such a thing, believe me. He’s _far_ too lovesick to care about some unfortunate strangers like that. I don’t suppose you can change the contract back for us?”

At her suggestion, Huey almost found himself reassured—until he looked back at Silk, who seemed suddenly larger with its rage, looming over the both of them. Its eyes seemed to flash.

“Change it back, Lady Dormentaire? Simply change it back, you say! For a year, I have tolerated your glibness, your arbitrary demands and changes, and now on the cusp of the sale you would toy with me in this manner? Even if the man I spoke to was not Huey Laforet, he must have been one of your agents. He knew too much to be otherwise, and the spies of the Neath have no influence in a city as trivial as this one. I will repeat what I said that night: if you demand any further changes to this contract, the bargain is off and you can keep your damn city!”

“ _No_ —”

But in the same moment that Huey finally managed to force a single word out of his mouth, Lucrezia held up a hand and spoke evenly, her smile pleasant and appeasing.

“Wait. The bargain stays as it is, then. I will not lose this sale.”

Huey looked at her in horror, the feeling of betrayal tight in his chest though he swore to himself that he’d never trusted her to begin with, that he never would have been so foolish. She did not take her glittering eyes off the Khan of Silk.

“Show me the contract,” she said. “If you doubt my sincerity, I’ll sign it right now, but you must let me see it first.”

With a huff, Silk produced a scroll of parchment from within its robes and offered it to Lucrezia. She spread it out on the desk, her gaze moving steadily and purposefully down the page. Huey felt his eyes sting with despair and closed them, sinking into the nearby chair. He knew that he should have been reading it along with her, looking for some kind of loophole—at his best, surely he could find such a thing—but at the thought of looking at that contract and seeing someone else’s name in place of Monica’s, his body refused to listen to him.

Long minutes passed in silence. Huey waited to hear pen scratch against paper as Lucrezia signed away his hope. But instead:

“Curious…”

Lucrezia’s voice. When Huey opened his eyes, she had turned towards the desk against the wall. She dug through one of the drawers there and then pulled out another set of papers, nodding as if she’d confirmed whatever had puzzled her.

“As I thought. I have some bad news for you, Silk.”

A beat, and then in a voice rife with exasperation, Silk asked, “What _now_?”

Lucrezia laid the new sheet of paper alongside the contract, gesturing for Huey to look, too. He stood on weak legs to examine them both. The new document was a list of names.

Lucrezia pointed first to a line in the contract. “Sylvie Lumiere and Gretto Avaro,” she said, and gestured to the list with her other hand, “were recent additions to the passenger list of the Advenna Avis, added _after_ the encounter with your mysterious masked man. To the best of my knowledge, they boarded and departed with the ship. It sounds like your love story has already flown the coop.”

Silk swooped towards the table and Huey took a hurried step back to get out of its way. It hunched over the two documents. Then there was something that wasn’t quite sound, something like muttering but sharper and harsher, something that made the air burn, and when Silk lifted its head again the not-sounds resolved into snarled Italian. “Hang the both of you, and whomever this third party is, and your _entire city_ —”

“Silk,” Lucrezia broke in, her voice sweet again, “it’s resolved easily enough, isn’t it? Better to have a love story than to have none, so just return the contract to the original one and be done with it.”

Another harsh un-sound, and suddenly the contract burst into flame. Lucrezia whisked the Advenna Avis passenger list out of range and gave a winning smile that even Huey could tell was false. “Is that agreement?”

“Keep your accursed city,” Silk snarled, and turned to leave, but—

With a single long step, Huey positioned himself in front of the door. He could still feel that his heart was beating, but now, his head was as clear as he needed it to be.

Silk took a step closer as if to emphasize how it towered over Huey, the threat in its bearing obvious.

“Get out of my way,” it said.

“I want Monica back,” Huey said. It was simple and it was all he wanted and now, as ever before, he would do whatever it took to achieve this one impossibility.

But Silk was unmoved. “I don’t give a damn what you want.”

“Then let me bring you the one who tried to deceive you.” Huey stood firm and spoke clearly so that it wasn’t obvious that he was scrambling for any kind of foothold now that his mind was working again. “His life in exchange for hers.”

“You mock me!”

Silk raised one hand, and Huey was more sure than ever that it had talons at the end of its gloved fingers, but he did not budge—because if this was hopeless, what reason was there to step aside? If he could not win Silk’s favor somehow—

But before the hand could bear down on him, Lucrezia spoke again.

“Silk, darling. Think about it for a moment—don’t all three of us want the same thing?”

It did not turn, so Huey followed the thought instead.

“You want this city,” he said evenly. “Lady Lucrezia and I want to sell it to you, for a love story. If we eliminate the interference, there’s nothing to stop this from going smoothly.”

Slowly, Silk lowered its hand. When it spoke, the fire had receded from its voice. “And do you know who this interference is, Huey Laforet?”

Huey swallowed, and for a moment he hesitated. But there was only one possible answer—the man who had been sent to tell Silk about the Advenna Avis, the man whose gentle smile had left Huey uneasy in a way he couldn’t explain—and so there was only one course of action he could take.

“Fermet. He’s one of the Dormentaires’ spies.”

As he said it, he stole a glance at Lucrezia—but whatever flavor of surprise he had expected to see on her face, it was absent. She remained serene, watching Silk for its reaction. And before Huey could get too far into asking himself whether she’d known, she spoke, a hint of her normal smile returning.

“What do you say, hmm? Is the deal back on?”

A long pause. Then—

“I want him alive,” Silk said, “before the city falls.”

“You’ll have him,” Huey swore.

“Then get out of my way.”

Huey stepped aside at last, and Silk swept out of the room.

 

Once Silk had gone, Huey shut the door and leaned heavily on it, willing his hurried breaths to calm. In the long silence that followed, he had time to notice that he was shaking.

It was Lucrezia who broke the silence. She sat down next to the table—not, perhaps, as lightly as she usually did—and turned a petulant eye toward Huey. “I  _warned_  you about that mask,” she said. “That silly habit of yours nearly cost us this sale.”

“I’m very sorry,” Huey said, his voice rasping a bit through his dry throat.

“Mm, I’ll bet you are. I’m tired of looking at it, so take it off.”

He removed the mask as ordered, turning it over in his hands to stare down at its blank white face. Monica’s mask. He still thought of it that way, though they’d shared it for five years, though for a year he’d borne this role alone. It made him sick with anger that someone had used the same mask to impersonate him in an effort to bring everything he’d done for Monica’s sake to naught. He raised his head—he had to ask Lucrezia about her traitorous spy—but before he’d figured out where to start, she sighed and murmured as if to herself, “Honestly, what a naughty thing that Fermet is.”

Huey furrowed his brow, trying to discern what she was thinking. Her voice was flippant; the delicate roll of her eyes looked mildly put out. There was still no surprise in her attitude at all.

“You knew it was him,” he said. “Before I spoke.”

“Oh, naturally. This is  _precisely_  his sort of scheme. Aren’t you lucky that he overreached this time?”

She lounged in the chair, relaxed once more, the normal smugness creeping slowly back into her smile. Huey stared in incomprehension.

“He’s done this before?”

“Well, comparable things, at least.”

“And yet you employ him?”

Untouched by the revulsion that coiled tightly in his stomach, she shrugged. “He’s cute, and useful, and dreadfully hard to pin down with any proper accusations. I’ve never found one person willing to testify against him. Besides, don’t you think it’s better to have him in our pay than in someone else’s?” She twirled a loose strand of hair around her finger. “After last year’s little mess, I did ask Carla to make sure he was kept busy. You’d think looking after two children and a girlfriend would keep a man occupied, wouldn’t you? I’m surprised he has time to even do his spy work, let alone scheme like this.”

Part of Huey’s mind registered the absurdity of Lucrezia’s flippant attitude, of the fact that she seemed only mildly irritated that one of her spies had nearly ruined her plans. But the rest of it was caught on the words  _last year’s little mess_. There was only one thing that could mean, but she couldn’t mean that—could she? Disbelief that bordered on outright denial prompted him to open his mouth and ask, “What happened last year?”

She sent him a patronizing look as if to say  _you don’t need me to tell you this_. “The  _play_ , Fire Witch.”

Huey stared at her, dumbfounded. His hands, gripping the mask tightly, were shaking again.

Whether unaware of Huey’s horror or simply uninterested in it, Lucrezia continued. “There are very, very few people who could have provided that playwright with all the juicy details of what your girlfriend did, and fewer still who would think it to be in any way a good idea. And of  _those_ , only one would have been able to tell him the story of  _your_  past as well.”

Huey shook his head, unconscious of the action. He felt light-headed—felt as cornered as he had when he watched the first play with Monica at his side, when he watched the second one with her gone.

“How?” he said, his voice more of a trembling whisper than anything else.

Lucrezia tilted her head with something like sympathy. “You really, truly didn’t realize? Huey, sweetheart, his father was a witch-hunter.”

⇔

_The balcony of the Boronial manor_

With a solemn face, Elmer listened to his friend’s story. Huey spoke with a careful steadiness, never smiling, his eyes trained on the city below.

“I met him as a child,” he said, disaffectedly. “I remember it now. I suppose it couldn’t be helped that I forgot him, considering everything else that happened. We only spoke once, and I must have blocked the memory from my mind once I realized what everything he said meant.”

He closed his eyes, strain clear on his face. Elmer wished he’d put these memories away and think about happy ones instead, but he knew better than to say anything.

“It was the morning after the witch-hunters took my mother,” Huey explained. “I was distraught, and to see someone my age, someone who didn’t seem touched by my panic, was… comforting. I thought we could be friends, because he smiled as kindly as my mother and everyone else did. But the things he said…” He shook his head. “He told me how my mother was being tortured, but with the way he was smiling, none of it sounded real, none of it made sense. And he assured me that as long as she really was a witch, it wouldn’t cause her any pain, so at first I wanted her to be a witch. But then I started to realize what that would mean, too…

“A week passed before I saw my mother again, at her trial. You know what happened there. The play was accurate enough. But of course he left himself out.” A bitter smile, then, one with no joy in it. “When she made her accusation, when I watched everyone I’d trusted realize that they would be tortured and tried in the same way she had, I saw him, too. The face he made… I remember it now.” He had taken something out of his pocket—a small velvet bag, with some kind of sphere inside it. Without opening the bag, he turned it over in his hand contemplatively. “I wish I didn’t.”

_He was smiling, huh?_

Elmer knew that was the only conclusion—from the way Huey was describing Fermet, and from the bitter pinch of his mouth and the way he was avoiding Elmer’s eyes. Elmer made no remark and kept his face solemn, and he waited.

After a long silence, Huey sighed and traded the bag for the spyglass, training it on the same spot as before.

“What you pointed out to Mr. Veils a little bit ago,” Elmer said, his voice light as though his question was a simple one with no implications whatsoever, “was that Fermet’s location?”

“It was,” Huey answered with a lightness that mimicked his.

“Why did Mr. Veils want to know?”

Huey shut the spyglass and leaned one arm on the balcony, his gaze directed inwards towards the manor. “I spoke to Fermet, you know. A little while ago.”

“Oh?”

“I had a hunch, you see. Something I wanted to confirm—a question only he could answer.” Again, his eyes closed and pain crossed his face. But he showed no sign of telling Elmer what he had asked, or what answer he had heard in return. All he said was, “You certainly would have liked the smile he gave me then.”

Huey opened his eyes and smiled, and it wasn’t quite a false one. But it was sarcastic, full of disgust and rage—all of it directed squarely at Elmer.

Elmer raised an eyebrow and asked, “Should I be apologizing?”

“No,” Huey said, almost sneering; then he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and repeated in a calmer tone, “No. There’s no need to apologize for what I’m imagining on my own.”

“I think what you’re imagining is probably right, though.”

“I know it is.” He opened his eyes. “But there’s no point in being angry at you. And in a few moments, it won’t matter either way.”

Elmer tilted his head. “Yeah?”

At that, Huey gave what was unmistakably a quiet laugh, and now his smile was a more normal one. He turned back towards the city and trained the spyglass on Fermet’s location once more, just as a black shadow blotted out the moon. “Yes. Because in a few moments, he’ll discover what a terrible idea it was to try to cross the Khan of Silk.”

⇔

_At the same time—_

_He’s late._

Lebreau stood in front of the patisserie where Monica Campanella had once worked, striving to keep his face calm for when Huey arrived. After half a week of avoiding any suspicion—after seeing Niki off to the Neath the previous morning—he certainly hadn’t expected Huey to ask to meet with him on the very night of Lotto Valentino’s fall. Another man might have been uneasy under such circumstances. But Lebreau, confident in his success, was only eager to learn what Huey had to say to him.

_Did he catch on?_

_Does he think he can beg me to change the contract back? Will he be angry? Despairing? Will he attack, or will he sink to the ground, utterly broken, when he realizes his Monica isn’t coming back to him?_

_Or what if he hasn’t realized after all? If it’s something else he wants to speak to me about, a message from Lucrezia? Should I tell him now, or wait until the city falls? It will fall soon enough, after all—maybe I should let him keep a few last minutes of hope._

_Ahh, Huey… You’ve brought me so much joy. This will probably break you for good, but at least we’ve had our fun together, yes? Ever since the time your mother showed me the first real witches I’d ever seen._

As past and present mixed together in his head, Lebreau bit down on his lip to hold in his smile. His heart beat fast with eagerness as he waited for Huey to join him.

If he hadn’t been so excited, he might have taken the time to wonder—

Why _was_ Huey so late to the meeting he had requested?

Why had he suggested that they meet not in a tavern or inn, but in the open street?

And why was there a faint smudge of too-violet light in the back of his mind, where memories of the last half-hour should have resided?

If he’d taken the time to wonder, he would have recognized the irrigo light for what it was: the color of forgetfulness. He may have identified the half-hour slip of time in his memories, may have realized that some of what he was envisioning was not purely from his imagination, may have at least thought to step inside and take shelter as he reconsidered what Huey intended.

But by the time a furious shout of Correspondence split the air and shook him from his trance, it was too late.

⇔

“Is Mr. Veils going to kill him?” Elmer asked lightly, not taking his eyes off Huey even as a strange shriek that was more pressure and fire than sound rent the sky.

And why would he look away from Huey? He was smiling, grim but undeniably genuine. He said, “The Vake is going to hunt him.”

“But he’s gonna die, right?” Elmer pressed.

“Oh, yes.” Huey’s smile grew at that.

Even so, Elmer sighed, thinking of Niki and the love for Fermet that she hadn’t been able to hide. He’d liked the way she smiled, and the way Fermet smiled back at her. It would be quite a challenge to make her smile again once she heard this.

Mistaking the cause of his sigh, Huey raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Maybe Silk will kill him too quickly for him to realize he’s lost, and he’ll die smiling.”

“Ooh, good point.” A grin tugged at Elmer’s face. “If he’s definitely going to die, I hope he dies like that.”

“I hope not, to be honest,” Huey said with a lean smile of his own. “We’ll see which of us has better luck.”

He looked through the spyglass once more, and Elmer looked towards the patisserie as well. Another un-sound crackled through the air, smelling like lightning, and a black shape swooped down and raked against the ground; then, moving like a bat or a bird of prey, it reared up and attacked the same spot again and again, sparks leaping up from the cobbled ground as if it had been struck by metal or flint. Vaguely—not as clearly as Huey, probably—Elmer could see that a human shape was at the center of the attacks.

“Looks like I’m the lucky one tonight,” Huey remarked, his voice full of vicious irony.

“Aw, bummer,” Elmer answered.

He’d have to figure out how to tell Niki later. But between the rare smile on his friend’s face and the instinctive sense that finally he was witnessing something that Mr. Veils really enjoyed, he didn’t feel too unlucky after all.

⇔

_Around the same time: in the Bazaar’s Fourth City_

A baby’s cry rang out through an empty city.

The young woman carrying him held him close and bounced him lightly, trying to calm his fussing, but the child kept crying as if picking up on her anxiety and translating it into sound. In this wide cavern it was the only sound that could be heard.

The young woman—Niki—held Lucien’s head close and progressed through the city’s empty streets.

At Fermet’s urging, she had left Lotto Valentino the morning before, headed for a cave outside the city. On her back, she carried Lucien, fast asleep thanks to one of Begg’s concoctions; over her shoulder, a bag containing a lantern and the two things that Fermet had promised would grant her passage to the Neath.

The first was the purse he had offered her a few days prior, jingling with coins.

The second was a pair of stones wrapped carefully in a pitch-black cloth.

_“Go as deep as you can into that cave, and then unwrap these stones. Strike them against each other like flint. From there, it should be clear what to do.”_

And so she had done just that, venturing deep into the cave and pressing on despite the bats that occasionally swarmed her lantern, shrieking their displeasure at the intrusion. When she reached what seemed to be the back end of the cave, she set the lantern down and took out the stones. They were warm, and seemed to have some kind of writing on them that glowed from within, but looking at it made her eyes sting.

She struck them together.

There was a flash of fire, as fast as lightning, and suddenly the stones were so hot that Niki dropped them without thinking. They upset the lantern, plunging her into darkness, and Niki caught her breath. But when she dropped to her knees to feel around for the lantern, she discovered something strange: where she expected to feel a wall, there was empty space. And as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she made out a faint, silvery light from deeper in the cave.

A new path had opened.

Retrieving the lantern and relighting it, Niki had made her way even further into the cave. And, after a half-hour of walking, to her utter surprise, she came to a lit booth. The man inside looked bored, even as he leaned towards her and asked something in a language she didn’t understand.

“I want—I want to go down,” Niki said nervously. No comprehension showed on the man’s face, but when she looked beyond the booth, she saw the funicular Fermet had mentioned, and by pointing and offering the purse, she got her point across. He escorted her to the car and shut its door with a rattle, and Niki began her descent into the depths of the earth.

And now, here she was.

Where there should have been a sky above her, there was instead a black expanse of rock; where there should have been sun or stars (what time was it?), there were only distant, purplish pinpricks of light. Bats flitted about aimlessly, paying her no mind.

And there was no one else in the city at all.

At first she had wondered if everyone was simply indoors, or gathered in some single location; but no one answered the doors she knocked on, and there was no breath of human life anywhere she looked. When Lucien woke up and began to fuss, Niki’s heart nearly leapt out of her chest at the sudden sound. She took him into her arms in an attempt to comfort him, all the while trying to convince herself that she wasn’t afraid. But the city’s stillness wore on her mind, and her worries became unshakable.

Finally, she saw something silver gleaming in the distance, heard the sound of liquid flowing. Progressing towards it, she found that it was a fountain in the shape of a silver tree. She took a seat on the edge of its basin, lifting a bit of the water to her mouth. It tasted drinkable, so she drank, and tipped a bit into Lucien’s mouth as well.

Only then did she breathe a long sigh. She needed to rest—how long had she been walking? It felt like hours just since she had arrived in the Neath. It must have been nearly time for the “fall” of Lotto Valentino that Fermet had spoken of; but he had yet to arrive. Not for the first time, Niki worried that he would be in Lotto Valentino as it fell instead of safely in the Neath, here with her and Lucien.

(Something rose faintly in her mind then, a question: was it truly safe here, in this empty, silent city? —But she couldn’t doubt Fermet, not after his trust in her, not after the chance he’d offered her; she couldn’t doubt him. He would be here soon enough.)

It seemed that Lucien had fallen asleep again, and Niki herself almost dozed off for a moment, until she heard a distant rumbling. Jolting awake, Niki looked around and saw—

 _Bats_.

Not the scattered handfuls she’d seen before, but hundreds of thousands of them, all suddenly swelling together towards the cavern’s roof, blocking out what light there was. Niki watched, her heart in her throat.

And then the roof began to fall.

⇔

_Aboard a Dormentaire ship_

“Espy, you’re not eating.”

Lucrezia looked across the table at Esperanza in concern, her own fork in hand.

“Do you at least eat when I’m not around? I worry, you know. The point was to take over your city, not starve you to death.”

Esperanza sighed. “I have been eating well enough. Please don’t worry on my behalf.”

“If you don’t want me to worry, then eat,” Lucrezia answered, lightly petulant, and so Esperanza had to pick up his fork.

She kept coming by. He was used to it, almost, but he still didn’t trust her; and every time she visited his cabin (his cell—it was still a cell), he only remembered what she had planned for Lotto Valentino. In the week since his arrest, nothing at all had happened. Esperanza wished he could believe that this meant that it had been one of her outrageous jokes—but he couldn’t bring himself to be so baselessly optimistic. And it would be pointless to ask her about it if she had no intention of speaking.

So he lifted his fork to begin eating—and, abruptly, stopped.

Something had moved outside the cabin window. Turning his gaze towards it, Esperanza thought he might have been seeing things—but a small black shape flitted past again, and then another, and then a handful all at once. They were bats, swarming just outside the ship.

There was a clatter across from him as Lucrezia’s fork hit her plate.

“It’s time!” she exclaimed, and in an instant she had risen from her chair and taken Esperanza’s hand. There was an excited look in her eyes, nearly a rapturous one. “Come with me, let’s go watch!”

And because he could not refuse a woman—and because _no one_ could refuse Lucrezia—he found himself pulled along, out of his cell and up to the deck. What he saw there made his stomach drop.

“Oh, Espy, look at them all…!”

At first, it looked like a storm cloud had descended upon Lotto Valentino.

But in a moment, Esperanza’s eyes adjusted to the twilight, and he could see that the cloud was made up of millions upon millions of bats, enough to cover the entire city with their wings. They swarmed the harbor as well, blotting out the moon.

It could only bode ill for the city, and the sight chilled Esperanza to the bone.

But with Lucrezia holding tight to his arm, nearly bouncing with her excitement, all he could do was watch.

⇔

_The balcony of the Boronial manor_

Now that Fermet was very definitely dead, Huey was noticeably more at ease. Some of his tension remained, but it was an eager one now, and he seemed right on the edge of a smile. As an enormous cloud of bats began to swarm over the city, Elmer nudged him in the ribs.

“I’m going to need your and Monica’s help, once this is all settled.”

Huey looked his way, one eyebrow raised. “Oh?”

“Yep. Like I said, this is going to make a lot of people really unhappy, and it is going to be _your fault_. You owe it to me to help me make them smile again.”

“Oh, is that what you’re getting at.” Huey didn’t deny the accusation. “What does that have to do with Monica, though? This is all my responsibility—my own selfish decision. _She_ shouldn’t owe you anything.”

“Oh, I know.” Elmer grinned cheekily at his friend. “But she’s not going to want to be apart from you for one single second.”

To that, Huey did not reply. But a bashful smile spread across his face, and even in the gray of twilight, it was clear his cheeks were tinged with pink.

When the bats descended upon the city like a black cloud, though, the smiles slipped from both of their faces as a deep calm spread over them. When the ground shuddered like an animal waking, they did not startle. When a black mist seeped over the city, the understanding of what they were seeing had already passed out of their minds like water through a sieve.

And then——

  
  
  
  
  
  


When the dust settled, Lotto Valentino had been transported and transformed.

The evening sky, the moon, even the clouds were all gone. In their place, almost a mile overhead, was the roof of an enormous cavern where strange purplish lights twinkled in a way that was somehow entirely unlike stars. The light they gave off was weak, weaker than moonlight, and the city was dark. Even when lit, the lamps lining the street seemed to be swallowed up by the vast darkness around them.

And as Huey and Elmer left the Boronial manor and made their way through these feebly-lit streets, they discovered that the city itself had been twisted. Streets were not where they should have been, or they turned at odd circuitous angles. It took much longer than it should have for them to reach the harbor.

Once they were there, however, locating their destination was a simple matter—because Lucrezia was on the deck of her ship, calling over its side.

“ _There_ you are!” she exclaimed, waving for Huey’s attention. “Come up here, hurry—poor Espy is _desperate_ for someone he can yell at.”

A single glance confirmed that the deposed count was, indeed, absolutely furious, his glare focused squarely on Huey. Probably because the only other people on the deck with him were Lucrezia and Carla—Lucrezia’s male guards and the sailors were conspicuously absent.

In an undertone, Elmer asked, “Do you mind? I think it might cheer him up a little.”

“I doubt he’ll smile,” Huey answered, as quiet as he but a bit more wry, “but I do deserve it.”

“You sure do,” Elmer said through an untroubled grin.

Huey made his way up the ramp to stand before the count, Elmer following behind.

And before Lucrezia could finish her gesture of _well, have at it then_ , Esperanza swung his fist and struck Huey in the face.

Huey winced and took an instinctive step backwards, but he did not deliberately withdraw. Holding one hand against what would undoubtedly become a bruise, he listened deferentially as the count began to shout.

“Huey Laforet, what have you _done_? To what fate have you damned this city for your selfish delusions? Were I still count, I would have you executed on the spot. Had I my pistol, I would challenge you to a duel. —Actually, I like that idea. Lucrezia, may I have my pistol?”

His voice softened when he addressed her, but she only shook her head with a smile. “No, darling, Huey’s in the protection of the House Dormentaire now.”

“Oh, _is_ he.” So he turned back towards Huey, raising his voice once more. “You claim to have loved my sister, and yet you join hands with the very Dormentaires who—with all due respect, Lucrezia, Carla—stole her life from her. And you consign Lotto Valentino to this—this _hell_ —”

“Hey, uh, Speran?” Elmer broke in suddenly.

Esperanza’s livid glare left Huey’s face for only a moment. “Silence, Elmer, I have no business with you right now! Unless you intend to tell me that you, too, had a hand in this scheme—”

“Well, not really, although I have been spying for them for a little while. That’s not important right now, though—”

“Not important?” Splotches of red prickled across Esperanza’s face. “You tell me that you, too, betrayed my sister and dare to say that that’s not important? That the two of you, her greatest friends, would shame her memory in this manner… count or not, Dormentaire protection or not, I will have both of you hanged, mark my words.”

Huey listened to all of this stoically, his face never changing despite the throbbing pain in his cheekbone. Elmer, on the other hand, only rolled his eyes. “You’re missing the _point_. Huey, help me out here—”

But before Huey could even open his mouth, Esperanza burst out with, “The _point?!_ ” and showed every sign of continuing in the same vein, if Elmer had not given up and grabbed Huey’s shoulders to turn him around to face the dock.

“ _Look_.”

Huey’s heart stopped.

And before he knew it was running, over the deck, down the ramp, across the dock to where, next to the Khan of Silk, in a simple gray dress and with her long blonde hair weighed down as if by water—

 _Monica_.

He halted a few feet away from her, hardly breathing, too afraid to believe this. Her eyes searched his face in the same way, her confusion obvious, but more importantly, more importantly than any of that, there was awe and _love_ as if they’d never been apart. She reached out trembling fingertips and then curled them back as if unsure where to place them. Her lips parted, and she breathed, “H… Huey…”

The sound of Monica’s voice broke Huey’s trance. He closed the remaining distance between them with a single step and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her as close as she could be. Immediately she embraced him in the same way, her arms tight around him, her hands clutching at the back of his shirt as his name escaped her lips again, this time in a gasp. He murmured her name in return, over and over, eyes tearing up at the familiarity of her body against his, of his head nestled into the crook of her shoulder. How many times over the past year had he feared forgetting this? Forgetting her face, the sound of her voice? Every night he’d called the memories to mind as if studying them, but they were nothing compared to this reality.

He pulled back, then, only to shift so that he could kiss her, but in doing so he saw that the confusion had not left her eyes. She searched his face once more.

“Huey, what’s… going on?” she asked, her voice hardly louder than a whisper. “I turned myself in, didn’t I? And then—I thought I—”

Huey tried to draw enough breath to answer, but just looking at her face had him breathless again, and speaking wasn’t what he wanted to do with his mouth right now. “I’ll explain, soon,” he promised, “just…”

And she had the same idea, so before he could bend down himself she draped her arms around his neck and pulled him close so that their lips could meet. She tasted—not like she had before, she tasted like metal and saltwater now, but the shape of her lips and the way she kissed, hesitant for only a moment before growing undeniably eager, all of that was the same. Huey held her close, his fingers tangled into her hair, his body molded to the familiar shape of hers.

At the sound of someone’s throat clearing, Huey’s world expanded to include other people again and he broke the kiss, though he still had no interest in looking anywhere other than at Monica. Based on proximity and pitch, the throat-clearing would belong to Silk.

“Are you satisfied, Huey Laforet?” the cloaked figure asked.

“Yes,” Huey answered at once. “Yes, I am more than satisfied.”

At this exchange, Monica took a moment to look around; she considered the Khan of Silk briefly before turning and glimpsing something that made her face soften into a gentle smile, different than the one she had for Huey.

“Elmer,” she said.

Huey turned as well to see that his friend had followed him off the ship—when, he didn’t know. It was possible that he’d been standing here the whole time, watching them. But Huey couldn’t resent him for it, because he had one more promise to keep.

“What about you, Elmer?” he asked, his arm looped around Monica’s waist still, hardly willing to take his eyes off her for more than a second at a time. “Are you satisfied?”

He wasn’t grinning, that was for sure. The expression on his face didn’t begin to compare to the bright smile Elmer wore constantly. But he _was_ smiling, relieved and joyful and honest and more comfortable than he’d been in a long, long time.

Elmer looked between the two of them, his eyes sparkling, and nodded once.

“I sure am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fear not, Niki's fate will be addressed in a bonus chapter (to be posted after the second half of the epilogue).


	9. Epilogue B: All Shall Be Well

_February 1, 1861_

Once the Duchess finished the story of Lotto Valentino’s fall, the Masked Regent stood, bid the two of them farewell, and left the Bazaar behind. Out on the cobbled streets, industrious urchins were just beginning to extinguish the lamps for the night. One got used to it all—the darkness and the artificial rhythm of the lamps—over the course of a century and a half. The Neath was not so bad, on the whole, and with few exceptions, most people considered themselves citizens of the Bazaar’s Fifth City rather than of Lotto Valentino by now.

That those same citizens had no idea what was coming for them with London’s fall was something to be regretted, perhaps, but some things were unavoidable.

The Masked Regent was feeling too poorly to spend any amount of energy worrying about that right now, too focused on reaching home before collapsing. What had once been regarded as the Boronial manor now stood not on the edge of the city but at its heart, near the Bazaar itself, and moreover was in the possession of Lucrezia de Dormentaire. But she spent most of her time at Zee or on the Surface, so it and the rest of the city was left in the care of her regents. The Masked Regent proceeded up the long walkway—lined with statues, now, rather than the hedges and gardens that had once decorated it. Only once inside, once the heavy doors swung shut in her wake, did Monica Campanella finally remove her mask and take a deep breath, leaning on the doors to steady herself.

She needed to see Huey.

He would be upstairs, in their bedroom. So she walked up the long staircase, clutching the banister all the while. She was winded and perspiring lightly when she made it to the top. But when she opened the door to the bedroom and saw Huey lying there, she had to catch her breath for another reason. He was still so beautiful. Even after a century and a half, even now, with his face pale and his skin dragged against his bones as he slept, he was beautiful and she loved him so much that she thought her heart would burst with it. And so, ignoring the half-full wineglass on the bedside table, she crossed the room with a faint smile on her face and slipped into bed beside him. She found his hand under the covers and took it, pressing their palms together, and some of her energy came back to her.

Huey stirred, opened his eyes. Saw her there and pulled her into a kiss to welcome her home. When it was over, she rested her forehead against his.

“It’s ready for you,” he said, glance flicking once to the wineglass beside the bed. “I thought you might need extra.”

“You were right.” Even sitting next to him like this, Monica still felt faint. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired. But I’ll be alright. You?”

“The same.” She reached over and picked up the wine glass. In a single gulp, she drained it; the liquid inside was still warm, but not at all unpleasant. She felt stronger as soon as the first drop touched her tongue. Then, setting the glass aside once more, she reached for Huey’s other arm, the one wrapped tightly in fresh bandages. She kissed the tender inside of his wrist and gave a soft sigh. He only pulled her closer. It was an unspoken ritual they had completed many, many times.

In the Neath, souls were extracted for trade and dead men could, under the right circumstances, be brought back to life; but even here, it was no simple matter to revive one who had died on the Surface. As the Duchess had warned Queen Victoria, there would always be a cost that was known and one that was not.

In 1710, Monica had been stabbed—had bled the life out of her body just before Huey could reach her. And so, now, her recrafted body failed to produce the amount of blood that would have kept her alive. Left on her own, anything but the lightest activity made her faint, and she had nearly wasted away entirely during their first weeks in the Neath.

But as long as she had Huey, she wasn’t alone.

They had settled into a familiar rhythm. Huey drew his own blood for Monica to drink, and while one rested, the other served as the public face of the Masked Regent. But in the bustle of London’s sale and Monica’s preference to spend most of their impending Zee-voyage asleep, the rhythm had been thrown off in the past week. Survivably so, but it was no wonder they were both exhausted. Huey leaned back in bed, and Monica snuggled close, eyes closed as she gave a relaxed smile.

Until—

“I still say you’re the cutest vampire I’ve ever seen, Moni-Moni.”

Monica started, her eyes flying open again to look around the room. There, in an armchair near the door, sat a brightly grinning Elmer C. Albatross. He hadn’t just come in, either. Judging by the two plates on the table next to him, he’d been here since quite some time before Monica arrived home.

“E-Elmer! You should have said something!” she exclaimed, her cheeks coloring.

“What, and distract you from those pretty smiles you and Huey were giving each other just now? Not a chance.”

“Smile Junkie.”

“You know it!”

One hundred and fifty years, and he hadn’t changed a bit. Monica shook her head (she’d given up on dissuading the vampire jokes a few decades back) as Huey snuck an arm around her waist.

“Sorry. I would have pointed him out to you if I’d known you hadn’t noticed,” he said.

“I was only looking at you,” she confessed. They both smiled at that, which of course would mean that Elmer was also content. But, Monica realized, this wasn’t the time for him to be in the Neath.

“How long are you staying, Elmer?” she asked, turning a troubled face towards him.

“Just a day or two!” Elmer leaned back in the chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “Don’t worry, Huey already tried to chase me back to the Surface. But as long as I leave when you two head out to Zee with Lucrezia, I’ll be safe, right?”

Monica breathed a sigh of relief. That should have him out of the way by the time the Masters started preparing for the new city’s fall. He wouldn’t need to know anything about the lacre-tanks. Immortal or not, she didn’t want to know what kind of effect that magnitude of grief would have on him. Huey’s arm tightened around her waist, and she knew he was thinking the same thing.

And Elmer, of course, could at least tell that they were concerned. “Oh, come on, you two,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re such worrywarts. I’ll be out of here tomorrow, I promise. So cheer up.”

He pushed the corners of his lips up with his fingers, a needless reminder for them to smile. Monica only turned her gaze towards Huey. “He’s coming into our home unannounced and making demands again.”

“And being a tactless voyeur on top of that,” Huey agreed. The exchange was familiar, their friend’s behavior anything but surprising. And Elmer never minded, because they were both smiling—at each other, and in the end, at him.

Monica snuggled a bit closer to Huey and yawned. “Well, as a punishment, he’s going to have to put up with my being a terrible host. I need to rest.”

“Yes.” Huey adjusted the pillows around her. “Sleep well, Monica.”

“Sweet dreams!” Elmer chimed in, self-serving as ever, and Monica rolled her eyes at him before she closed them. The bed was warm and comfortable, Huey’s arms were even more so; and soon, lulled by the vibrations in Huey’s chest as he answered Elmer’s every ridiculous thought, Monica drifted off into a deeply contented sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to work this into the text, but it wouldn't have fit neatly--Elmer's immortal because by the time Victor (whom Lucrezia did NOT piss off in this AU) sent some of the elixir to Lucrezia, she'd already gotten her hands on some Hesperidean Cider and didn't need it. At Huey's request slash because he was such a great spy, she let Elmer have part of her share.  
> The other reason is "because I want him to be."


	10. Bonus chapter 1: An Admirer of Beauty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucrezia calls for Victor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Follows Lucrezia's chapter 3 conversation with Esperanza. VictorxLucrezia fluff, arguably? This is not The bonus chapter I've referred to, that's still in progress. It is simply A bonus chapter.

As Lucrezia emerged from the cell, Benito reached out to take the tray from her hands.

“Ah, I’ll keep the wine,” she said, and plucked the bottle from the tray to dangle its neck between her fingers. She smiled. Her guards did not smile back.

“Milady…” Carla began, and Lucrezia raised an eyebrow to invite the rest of the question that was clear on Carla’s face.

“You seem upset,” Carla said in a low voice, as if apologetic to be calling attention to it. “Did the Count say something…?”

Lucrezia laughed, to start. “Espy, say something to upset a woman? Don’t be silly.”

Carla acknowledged her point with a nod of her head, but she still looked concerned. _Was_ Lucrezia upset? She doubted it. To be upset would be to feel bad, and she didn’t feel bad, just—strange. But she had the rest of this delicious wine to herself, and she had her many companions. That Esperanza was not among their number should hardly matter.

She cast about her mind for a moment; she wanted to be with someone. Carla would have been nice, to relieve the worry on the poor dear’s face, but Carla had to be left here to guarantee Esperanza’s good behavior. And she wasn’t in the mood for anyone who had traveled to Lotto Valentino with her. Instead, then—

“I want Victor,” she declared, and turned towards Gabriel. “Fetch him for me, will you, darling?”

“At once, Lady Lucrezia.”

“Thank you, dear. I’ll be in my cabin.”

And, wine in hand, she headed to her cabin without giving the matter a second thought.

*

The past few days had been a hell of an experience for Victor.

First, two nights ago, another Dormentaire ship had arrived in Lotto Valentino. Victor hadn’t thought much of this to begin with, because what was one more to the fleet that already towered over the harbor? But then he’d heard the news that Lucrezia was on board. He chewed the ear off the messenger who brought him this information, railing against her carelessness in not traveling with proper escort ships. The messenger calmly reassured him that Lucrezia was quite safe, and that as long as no one who knew threw a tantrum about how she chose to make her travels (this with a dirty look in Victor’s direction), the people of Lotto Valentino would never suspect her presence. So, red-faced, he sent the messenger away with the sheepish command to give Lucrezia his regards.

The following morning, he’d received a set of orders written in her fluid hand: he was to leave Lotto Valentino aboard the Advenna Avis with a number of alchemists from the city. The letter promised that the arrangements would all be made for him and reiterated that he was commissioned any and all results of his research with the House Dormentaire. Normally he would have been overjoyed simply at the sight of Lucrezia’s elegant handwriting, but this time his heart sank as he thought of the wide, wide Atlantic Ocean that would soon separate him from the woman he loved.

It was while he was moping over that development, apparently, that Dormentaire soldiers arrested Count Boronial. He didn’t hear about this until morning the next day, and he heard about it from Szilard, who had apparently known all along. Fucking typical. A superior smirk on his face, Szilard had stopped just short of suggesting that it had been Lucrezia’s idea to leave him out of the loop; but even without his insinuations, Victor would have guessed as much anyway. He grumbled to himself and resolved to give her a piece of his mind the next time he saw her, fully aware that he had made such resolutions in the past, only to completely forget about them once actually in her presence. If not before then. He didn’t see her often. Maybe he’d be better off writing her another letter.

He groused about all of this to Denkuro, Nile, and Zank over a pint of beer. Not a one of them seemed particularly sympathetic, but the way they ribbed him about the matter was friendly, and Victor didn’t mind it too much. And just as Denkuro was agreeing that yes, Victor-dono, a letter may be sufficient, a familiar figure approached them. One of Lucrezia’s guards—he couldn’t remember which. They all sort of bled together, with the obvious exception of Carla.

Expecting another capricious order of some kind, he waved his hand to assure the guard that his drinking companions could be trusted. But the guard’s message was not at all what he expected.

“Lady Lucrezia wishes to see you.”

Victor choked on his drink.

“S-she what?”

“She wishes to see you,” the guard repeated in the same even tone.

Nile thwacked Victor on the back, which made his coughing worse rather than better. “I say this: you have good fortune. Now you’ll be able to give that woman a piece of your mind like you wanted to.”

Zank leaned towards Denkuro and muttered something in Japanese. From the barely contained smirks on their faces, it didn’t take a genius to guess the gist of what he’d said. They were good-natured smirks, though, so Victor restrained himself to a brief glare as he finally stifled his coughs and straightened.

“Guess I’d better go, then.”

“You’d better,” Denkuro agreed, even the suggestion of a smirk still looking out-of-place on his face. Come to think of it, Nile was hiding a grin, too. These bastards. At least there were a few people he could call friends in this town. Victor left a few coins on the table for his drink, waved good-bye, and followed his lady’s guard to the ship where she awaited him.

Apparently this whole crazy experience wasn’t over just yet.

*

Still irritated at the poor sense of arriving in a common battleship, Victor gave his surroundings a dark glare as he headed up the ramp and across the deck. But once he was below decks he grudgingly admitted (to himself—not out loud) that the ship was certainly of high-enough quality for her. Fucking Dormentaires. Even their warships were opulent.

_Her_ cabin was, incredibly, even more so. Victor tried not to gape too much, but by the time he looked away from the silks draped casually over the back of a cushioned chair and the towering four-poster bed (really? on a ship?) and looked instead at his lady, she was smirking.

“Good evening,” said Lucrezia de Dormentaire.

“Good evening,” Victor parroted, instantly breathless. In this needlessly ornate room, she was still the most beautiful sight by far. Her clever, greedy eyes framed by perfectly arranged golden hair, her slender neck, the Oriental-looking dress of shimmering blue that left her shoulders bare—and that was as far as he got before she pressed herself against him, her lips meeting his. He grunted and answered the kiss hungrily. With one hand cupped around the back of her head, he pulled her even closer, and she hummed her appreciation against his mouth. Fuck, how did he get so lucky?

When they stepped back, her hair was not so perfectly arranged anymore and their faces were both flushed. Lucrezia pulled the rest of her hair down with one hand and gestured towards the table beside them with the other. “Some wine, darling?” she offered, sounding rather breathless herself. “There’s a little bit left.”

Victor shrugged. “Nah, I was halfway through my second pint when your guard found me.” And he could think of better things to do with this time than drinking.

“Mm, are you sure? It’s very good wine. I had my sommelier pick it out from the count’s cellar.”

“A-ha. Which is now _your_ cellar, right?” Victor shook his head with a crooked grin. “I almost forgot that congratulations were in order. I don’t know what you think you’re gonna get out of this shithole, but you’ve sure as hell got your claws in it now.”

Lucrezia answered with a graceful curtsey and a _very_ smug smile.

“Don’t tell me this is some kind of celebration?” Victor felt a warmth spread through his chest and a blush come to his face. Maybe she held a higher opinion of him than he’d thought. “Gotta say, I’m flattered.”

But Lucrezia only tilted her head and made a thoughtful hum. Alright, well, there was that particular flight of fancy dashed against the rocks.

“I suppose it’s _something_ like that, yes,” she said after a moment. “I wanted to celebrate with Espy earlier, but he wasn’t interested.”

And which lucky bastard was Espy? She said that like he should have recognized the name.

…Wait. Espy—Esperanza?

“The count?” Victor clarified.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Didn’t want to celebrate your takeover of his city with you.”

“Not at all,” Lucrezia said, crossing her arms in a pout. “He hardly even touched the dinner I brought him.”

“You don’t say.”

Victor could imagine a number of very good reasons for the count’s reluctance. But the same time, he couldn’t imagine refusing Lucrezia anything she asked, especially when she pouted like this. God, he’d seen men and women alike fall over themselves to try to bring a smile back to her face. He’d done the same. More than once.

Before he could make his attempt this time, though, she gestured to the table once more. “You’re sure about the wine?” she asked. When he nodded, she poured the remainder into her glass—it really was only about two mouthfuls—and polished it off herself in a long gulp.

“It is very good,” she mused, mostly to herself. “I wonder what else he’s got in that cellar of his.”

Victor’s brow furrowed. He reached out and guided the hand holding the wine glass back down to the table, where she released it without reluctance. Then he slid his thumb beneath her palm, massaged gently.

“What’re you after, kitten?” he asked with a tilt of his head.

With her free hand, she reached up and traced his jawbone, her eyes bright and selfish and _god_ , completely irresistible. Victor felt his cock stir in his pants. Lucrezia noticed; she glanced down and traced her tongue over her teeth, then looked up at him once more, smiling faintly. “It’s nothing particularly special tonight…”

“Well, good,” Victor said with a hint of a laugh. “Last time you wanted something special I couldn’t walk straight for days.”

The joke—well, it was the truth, but he’d turned it into a joke—got a laugh out of her, too, and her real smile was starting to come back. She rubbed herself against his hard-on, just once. “You know what I’m in the mood for?” she breathed, holding his gaze with hers. “I’m in the mood to be adored.”

He grinned, wolfish. “Now _that_ , I know I can manage.”

And then she was pulling him into a kiss again, then he was moaning and molding his body to hers, then she was digging a hand down his pants and _mmf_ , yeah, he had no idea why they’d wasted so much time talking instead of fucking. He barely needed to break the kiss to get out of his shirt and trousers; her dress was trickier because he couldn’t tell where the fuck it started or ended, and she laughed at him for that, but the laugh dissolved into a long, high gasp once it was out of his way and he could press his lips to her chest. She breathed _oh, Victor_ and drew him towards the bed, and he gladly, greedily followed.

If Lucrezia wanted to be adored—why, then, it was his duty to adore every inch of her.

*

When he was spent, she gathered his head into her lap and stroked his hair, smiling down at him, nearly glowing with her satisfaction. He gazed back, as awed by her as he always was. The unease he thought he’d sensed from her was gone, and unless she made a point to speak of it, he was willing to believe it had never existed. It wasn’t impossible that he’d been imagining things.

But her eyes did take on a sad light for just a moment.

“Victor, sweetheart, I’ve been ever so worried. Are you angry with me?”

“No!” he answered right away, his earlier irritation forgotten. “How could I ever…?”

She raised an eyebrow as if she knew that she had any number of vexing traits, but offered her reason calmly. “I’m sending you so far away,” she mused, tracing his jawline, “all the way to the New World. You’ll miss me, won’t you?”

Oh. He’d been doing his best not to think about that. Victor felt a pang in his heart and gave a wry smile. “Yeah, I’ll miss you a lot,” he said, his voice suddenly rough. “Wish you were coming along rather than that old bastard Szilard.”

“It would certainly be an adventure,” Lucrezia said with a smile, her eyes shining, “but I’m all set to go on an adventure of my own here.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mmhmm. I’ll write and tell you all about it if you promise to write back to me.”

“Hah. How could I refuse a deal like that?” He reached up to the back of her neck and she bent to kiss him. It was a long kiss, and though it hurt to crane his neck up, the sigh he let out when it ended was one of longing. He stared into her eyes as if trying to carve them into his memory. “Fuck. I’m really going to miss you, Lucrezia.”

“Oh, Victor. I’ll miss you too.” She ran her palms over his chest, bent into another kiss, held him close. Her gentle touch soon had him teetering on the edge of a comfortable sleep, and he welcomed it, feeling safer and more content in her arms than he did most anywhere else.

And as he drifted off, he heard something—a murmur so gentle that he couldn’t say for sure that he hadn’t dreamed it—

“But never fear, my darling Victor. If all goes well, we’ll have all the time in the world to see each other again.”


End file.
